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What Type of Leader Are You?
The leadership in your company is often the difference between a good company and a great company.
Leadership (not just the boss, but the top-level managers as well) can make or break a company.
Am I hands-on or hands-off? Am I encouraging my team to grow? Have I made our company objectives and values inherent?
These are all questions that we – as leaders – need to be asking.
As you answer those questions, you can also be thinking about what leader archetype you follow …
- Laissez-Faire leaders are hands-off. They don't directly supervise employees or provide regular feedback. Highly trained employees may benefit from this style, but most employees find this a hindrance.
- Transactional leaders show the difference between a leader and a manager. They're worried about tasks and provide reward/punishment based solely on task completion.
- Autocratic leaders make decisions without the input of others. They possess total authority and impose their will on their employees. This can benefit low-level employees who require close supervision. This will stifle creative employees.
- Participative leaders are democratic. They value the input of their team members but hold ultimate decision-making power. This can cause challenges when there's a time crunch.
- Transformational leaders require high levels of communication from their management team. They motivate employees through effective communication and high visibility. This requires more involvement from the various layers of management.
Or you can check out this less serious flowchart to see which fictional boss you are.
via FastCompany
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – December 17th, 2017
I just saw the new Star Wars with my family.
It's a bit crazy to think about what percentage of my life occurred since the original came out
I can still remember watching the first one.
BTW, I'm not 60 yet … but, I am pushing double nickels.
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
- LeBron James: Keeping a Billion-dollar Body in Shape. (CNN)
- Success Strategies from a Self-made Billionaire. (TonyRobbins)
- When Robots Dream: AI Systems May Learn Better and Faster If They Can Sleep'. (Siliconangle)
- Machine Ethics and Artificial Moral Agents. (KDNuggets)
- The CIA is Telling Us How the Agency Uses Americans' Data. (Mashable)
- FCC Revokes the Net Neutrality Rules. (NordVPN)
- Janet Yellen Calls Bitcoin 'Highly Speculative'. (CNN)
- Driverless Cars Will Change Auto Insurance. Here's How Insurers Can Adapt. (HBR)
- This Investor Says Millennials are 'Starting to Buy Homes in a Big Way'. (CNBC)
- Google Leads in the Race to Dominate Artificial Intelligence. (Economist)
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2017 In Review: Progress, Flow and Change
I was out of the office last week for a series of meetings and strategic planning sessions.
I love getting away from the business to work on the business. That means stepping back from day-to-day issues, to look at the bigger picture. It also means getting back in-touch with mission, values, goals, and intent.
In a sense, the process acts like a compass, which sets the general direction for the journey.
In addition, preparing for a series of meetings, like this, is a lot like working on a business plan.
Personally, I've found that that one of the primary benefits of creating a business plan has almost nothing to do with the plan itself. Working on the plan, immersing yourself in the ideas and possibilities, and ultimately choosing what stays-in – versus what's filtered out … there's magic in that.
Yes, the plan is important. But it is the planning that takes you from thinking … to feeling … to knowing. That's where you capture the real benefit of business planning.
A Good Sign.
Sometimes you hear a question and it takes the air out of an idea. Other times, a question helps you make a new distinction or consider an alternate and better course of action.
A great planning session creates an environment ripe with pushing, pulling, probing, and deep thought … yet, the result is momentum.
How to Tell You Are On the Right Track.
I tend to be analytical. Yet, over time, I've come to believe that one of the best tools to measure whether you are on the right track is how you feel.
Have you ever gotten a phone call from someone, and when you saw or heard that it was from them, you wilted? In contrast, have you ever become more animated and energized while interacting with someone else? It is easy to recognize the difference.
Each person has different thoughts, people, or situations that trigger these positive and negative states.
In sports, this positive state is often referred to as being "in-the-Zone". It is also called "Flow". It happens when someone is fully immersed in what they are doing, has a feeling of energized focus or awareness, full involvement, and success in the process of their activity.
Being in Flow feels good. On some level, when you are in Flow, you know you're on the right track.
Are you on the right track?
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Creating An Artificial Intelligence Methodology: AI’s Hierarchy of Needs
We often talk about Artificial Intelligence's applications – meaning, what we use it for – but we often forget to talk about a more crucial question:
How do we use AI effectively?
Many people misuse AI. They think they can simply plug in a dataset, press a button, and poof! Magically, an edge appears.
Most commonly, people lack the infrastructure (or the data literacy) to properly handle even the most basic algorithms and operations.
That doesn't even touch machine learning or deep learning (where you have to understand math and statistics to make sure you use the right tools for the right jobs).
Even though this is the golden age of AI … we are just at the beginning. Awareness leads to focus, which leads to experimentation, which leads to finer distinctions, which leads to wisdom.
Do you remember Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs? Ultimately, self-actualization is the goal … but before you can focus on that, you need food, water, shelter, etc.
In other words, you most likely have to crawl before you can walk, and you have to be able to survive before you can thrive.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Science follow a similar model. Here it is:
First, there's data collection. Do you have the right dataset? Is it complete?
Then, data flow. How is the data going to move through your systems?
Once your data is accessible and manageable you can begin to explore and transform it.
Exploring and transforming is a crucial stage that's often neglected.
One of the biggest challenges we had to overcome at Capitalogix was handling real-time market data.
The data stream from exchanges isn't perfect.
Consequently, using real-time market data as an input for AI is challenging. We have to identify, fix, and re-publish bad ticks or missing ticks as quickly as possible. Think of this like trying to drink muddy stream water (without a filtration process, it isn't always safe).
Once your data is clean, you can then define which metrics you care about, how they all rank in the grand scheme of things … and then begin to train your data.
Compared to just plugging in a data set, there are a lot more steps; but, the results are worth it.
That's the foundation to allow you to start model creation and optimization.
The point is, ultimately, it's more efficient and effective to spend the time on the infrastructure and methodology of your project (rather than to rush the process and get poor results).
If you put garbage into a system, most likely you'll get garbage out.
Slower sometimes means faster.
Onwards.
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What’s Next … Robot Rockstars?
Artificial Intelligence has already been used to compose various pieces of music, but they're not replacing real "stars" anytime soon.
A New Zealand musician, Nigel Stanford, released a video with an imagined collaboration between himself and a team of crane-armed robots.
He spent about a month programming the robots.
Check it out.
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – December 10th, 2017
This was sent to me this week. What do you think?
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
- Black Friday Posts New Single-Day Record for Gun Checks at More Than 200,000. (USAToday)
- If GPS Failed, We'd Be More Than Lost. (Wall Street Journal)
- So, What's Your Story? 3 Ways Storytelling Can Help Boost Your Business. (Entrepreneur)
- How Bad Decision Making Could Undermine Good Innovation. (TechCrunch)
- IBM Predicts 5 Life-changing Innovations in the next 5 Years. (VentureBeat)
- Prince Harry's Marriage to Meghan Markle Means the IRS Gets a Look at Royal Bank Accounts. (Inc)
- Time Inc. Sells Itself to Meredith Corp., Backed by Koch Brothers. (New York Times)
- Black Friday Pushes Jeff Bezos' Net Worth to $100 Billion. (TechCrunch)
- NASA to Explore an Asteroid Containing Enough Mineral Wealth to Collapse the World Economy. (BigThink)
- This Fintech Giant Wants to Recreate the Bell Labs Experience in NYC. (QuantNews)
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Here Are Some Links For Your Weekly Reading – December 3rd, 2017
Here are some of the posts that caught my eye recently. Hope you find something interesting.
- The Seven Powers of Gratitude. (LeadershipFreak)
- The Top 18 Destinations for 2018. (ThePointsGuy)
- Lab-Grown "Clean Meat" is Almost Here. Will You Eat It? (BigThink)
- The White House Wants to Ban Cellphones, Citing Security Risk. (TechCrunch)
- The 12 Best Business Books of the Year, According to Stanford Business School. (BusinessInsider)
- CryptoCurrencies and Blockchains. (Inference-Review)
- Investors Beware: 'Sentiment' is Not an Exact Market-Timing Tool. (Forbes)
- Institutions Shift More Assets Into Smart Beta. (FT)
- 'Stealth Hedging' Shows Investors Not So Complacent. (Reuters)
- Entrepreneurs Eye the Early Exits as M&A Activity for Young Companies Rises. (CityAM)
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Naked & Afraid: Celebrity Edition – SNL
To give you a break from your year-end planning, here's something that requires no brain cells.
SNL via YouTube
