Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Seasons Greetings

 Enjoy Your Holidays




The debate between talent and character is a longstanding one, particularly in the 
context of personal and professional development. Each has its merits and significance, 
and their relative importance can vary depending on the context and individual goals. 
Let's explore both concepts and their differences:

Talent:

Innate Abilities: Talent refers to innate abilities or natural aptitudes that a person possesses. These abilities can encompass a wide range of areas, such as sports, arts, music, mathematics, or other skills. People often display talent from an early age, and it may come more effortlessly to them compared to others.

Potential for Excellence: Having talent can provide a head start and the potential for excellence in a particular field. It can make it easier to acquire advanced skills and achieve high levels of performance with less effort compared to those who lack that innate talent.

Limitations: Talent alone does not guarantee success or long-term achievement. It's possible to have talent but not capitalize on it through hard work and dedication. Additionally, talent in one area may not necessarily translate to success in other aspects of life.

Character:

Personal Qualities: Character refers to a person's moral and ethical qualities, including attributes like honesty, integrity, perseverance, resilience, empathy, and self-discipline. It encompasses how a person behaves, treats others, and approaches challenges and setbacks.

Work Ethic: Character is closely tied to work ethic and the determination to put in the effort required to develop skills and achieve goals. Even without natural talent, a strong character can lead to success through perseverance and dedication.

Long-Term Success: While talent can provide an initial advantage, character often plays a 
more critical role in long-term success. It enables individuals to navigate obstacles, 
adapt to changing circumstances and maintain positive relationships with others.

See You at the Top

Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Smart Tech and Adoption

The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village......(Marshall Mcluhan, The Gutenber Galaxy, 1962)


Smart technology and a sustainable framework is a necessity for every modern city

Three main factors are spurring acceleration in the adoption of IoT solutions:

  • Technology. There has been a remarkable advances in technology with affordable sensors that enables deployment of IOT at scale. Sensors now cover the entire spectrum, from visual to sound. Computing is fast enough, storage is bigger; battery power has improved. AI and machine learning are faster for more granular insights for automated decision from sensors.

  • Networks. Telecom companies with fourth-generation (4G) networks have spread to cover more people at higher performance and 5G networks are rapidly being deployed. There is visible improvements matched with connectivity options associated with capacity, speed, latency and reliability.

  • Perceived value proposition. Cities see real value in deploying the IoT, a core enabler of the digital transformations and sustainability drives under way in companies and public institutions around the world. The $1.6 trillion in economic value generated from IoT solutions in 2020/21 exemplifies the technology’s ability to deliver value at scale.

All is not favorable for large-scale adoption IoT solutions. 

Three factors are acting to dampen growth:

  • Interoperability. the IoT landscape contains numerous proprietary ecosystems. Many companies and public-sector bodies are struggling to get to scale without significant IT work to overcome the numerous system barriers.
  • Installation. is one of the biggest cost issues in the deployment of IoT solutions at scale. every at-scale deployment requires customization, if not an entirely bespoke solution. 
  • Privacy. is now the core issue for many consumers. 

Companies are grappling with what customers are willing to give up in return for lower prices or special offers in a retail setting.

See You at The Top

Sunday, October 31, 2021

Perfect Waste of Electronics


Nothing, like Something, happens anywhere..........(Philip Larkin, English Poet, 1955)



Every device ever produced has a carbon footprint and E-waste is now the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. 

E-waste is defined as anything with a plug, electric cord or battery from toothbrushes to laptops that has reached the end of its life, as well as the components that make up these end of-life products. 

E-waste is also called waste electrical or electronic equipment (WEEE)

E-waste is often incinerated or dumped in landfills and sometimes pulled apart by hand or burned by the world’s poorest, to the detriment of health and the environment. E-waste can be toxic, is not biodegradable and accumulates in the environment, in the soil, air, water. 

E-waste may represent only 2% of solid waste streams, yet it can represent 70% of the hazardous waste that ends up in landfill.

One solution is Electronics as a Service;

The process/service called dematerialization, and is happening in many aspects of people’s lives. 

- In the Netherlands, Signify (formerly Philips Lighting) sells lighting as a service, 

- In the UK, Rolls Royce sells airplane engine time rather than jet engines. 

Current leasing and rental models can also help with dematerialization;

With monthly contracts for smartphones, televisions, allow global consumers to access the latest technology, particularly products with short lifespans and without high up-front costs. Access to innovation and upgrades continues unabated, while barriers to usership have also lowered. With this new ownership model, the manufacturer has an incentive to ensure that all the resources are used optimally over a device’s lifecycle including recycling. 

There is also an incentive to keep the value in products for as long as possible, extend the life of devices, repair them when necessary, eliminate waste and reduce the impact that electronic products have on the environment.

Instead of a one-off transaction, the business model shifts to one of an ongoing service, and the subscription economy. This builds a much closer and stronger customer relationship. 

The rise of cloud computing has also helped with dematerialization, by moving the capability of devices away from hardware purchase and into remote data centers, hardware capabilities become less important relative to connectivity and services. 

In turn, this would increase product life cycles and decrease waste in the system.

This same e-waste represents a huge opportunity;

There is 100 times more gold in a ton of mobile phones than in a ton of gold ore. 

Furthermore, harvesting the resources from used electronics produces substantially less carbon-dioxide emissions than mining in the earth’s crust. 

Hence, all of the medals presented this summer at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were extracted from old phones.

However; Working electronic goods and components are worth more than the materials they contain. Therefore, extending the life of products and re-using components brings an even larger economic benefit (including mining of digital currency). 


See You at the Top

Monday, September 27, 2021

Intangibles of Wealth

The central event of the twentieth century is the overthrow of matter. In technology, economics, and the politics of nations, wealth in the form of physical resources is steadily declining in value and significance. The powers of mind are everywhere ascendant over the brute force of things.............George Gilder





Our economies are getting richer despite using less physical material. Aluminium drinks cans, declined in weight six-fold between 1996 and 2011. A modern mobile phone is smaller lighter and more powerful than 1980s handset. The blockchain crypto currency is being adopted as a store of value over traditional Fiat money

In business, 2011 was the first time for decades that the world’s largest company was not an oil company. By 2016, six firms based on digital technologies – Apple, Tencent, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook – were among the top ten largest on earth.

The breakthroughs in solar and wind power ridding us of the shackles of barrels of oil and tons of coal

Tesla, the electric car company managed to reduce the amount of cobalt, a distressing mineral to acquire, in its batteries by about 60% between 2012 and 2018.

Rather than building a new car, we build a digital model of a new car and run computational simulations of the new car through the power of AI. Less cost and less energy-intensive 

AI also enables researchers to expand quickly by analyzing vast data sources, many diseases and treatments in order to encompass the complexity of biology. One reason for the early vaccine breakthrough for Covid19

AI is not a single technology or product, but rather a set of techniques, mathematical models and algorithms with the ability to extract insights from large datasets, identify patterns and predict the probabilities of potential outcomes of complex, multivariate situations. 

AI is often confused with automation, but the two are distinct but related: automated systems perform repetitive tasks following a programmed set of rules, while AI identifies patterns and insights in data and “learns” to do this more accurately and effectively over time.

AI can also be classified by the forms of input data: audio, speech, images, videos, data gained from sensors, data collected manually or robotically.

In summation; the value of your product is not in its tangible heft, rather it is in the intangibles, the know-how, the design, the engineering, the specification and the brand.

See You at the Top

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

A Second Life

Improvisation is too good to leave to chance...........Paul Simon (1990)



Preparing for the certainty of uncertainty is a plan for the guaranteed unforeseeable.

Products tend to flow through the path of least resistance, so you want to make the path which goes through formal channels of recycling less resistant

As the production of electric vehicles is expected in rise to combat green house gases, there is a potential environmental timebomb in their batteries.

The plan should start now:

Batteries that are no longer be able run vehicles could have second lives storing excess power generated by solar or windfarms.

The energy company Enel Group is using 90 batteries retired from Nissan Leaf cars in an energy storage facility in Melilla, Spain, which is isolated from the Spanish national grid.

The energy company Powervault partnered with Renault to outfit home energy storage systems with retired batteries in the UK

A data approach could be a digital “passport” – an electronic record for a battery that would contain information about its whole life cycle.

The battery lifecycle refers to the various stages a battery goes through from its initial manufacturing to its eventual end-of-life. The lifecycle of a battery is influenced by factors such as usage patterns, charging and discharging cycles, environmental conditions, and the type of battery chemistry.

It's important to note that the lifecycle of batteries can vary significantly depending on the type of battery. Common battery chemistries include lithium-ion (Li-ion), nickel-metal hydride (NiMH), lead-acid, and alkaline, each with its own characteristics and performance attributes. Additionally, advancements in battery technology and recycling practices continue to shape the overall lifecycle and sustainability of batteries.

See You at The Top

Friday, July 30, 2021

Cyber Risk Challenge

Terror.......often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking......(Stephen king, American writer, 1981)

Governments and Businesses are struggling to cope with the scale and complexity
of managing cyber risk. Over the last year, remote working, rapid digitalization and
the need for increased connectivity have emphasized the cyber security challenge. 








One tool that has gained traction is cyber insurance. If it can follow the path of
other insurance classes, it could play a significant role in managing digital risk.

However; across government and business they have consistently stated that the positive effects of 
cyber insurance on cyber security have yet to fully materialize. 

If the benefits are to be crystallized, the insurance industry must overcome significant challenges.

Some challenges include: 
  • The industry is struggling to collect and share reliable cyber risk data that can  inform underwriting and risk modelling. 
  • The insurers and reinsurers are unable to accurately assess organization's risk profile or price policy premium.
  •  The number of systemic incidents has limited the availability of capital for cyber insurance markets.

To overcome these challenges, a more coordinated action by government and regulators is necessary to help the industry reach its full potential.

Some coordination's include:
  •     Developing guidance for minimum security standards for underwriting
  •     Expanding data collection and data sharing
  •     Mandating cyber insurance for government suppliers
  •     Creating a new collaborative approach between insurers and law enforcement agencies 

Finally, It is important to note that a good cyber hygiene is still the responsibility of your organization, 
and the primary purpose of cyber insurance is to transfer residual risk
 

See You at The Top...

Monday, June 28, 2021

Tech Train in China

 The world's civilization started from the day on which everyone received reward for labour (Andrew Carnegie Autobiography 1920)

20 years ago 41 of the worlds 100 most valuable companies were in Europe now down to 15 

  • US and China grew by creating big companies (Tech Train) while No new firms emerged in Europe
  • The rich are mostly entrepreneurs in China and US while The rich are mostly Heirs in Europe
  • Policymakers in Europe promote mergers but not competitiveness while R&D is far less than China and US

“Here in China, many are willing to take high risks and live their entrepreneur dream to the fullest. They are working with a ‘try fast and fail fast’ mindset, and function within a more flexible legal environment than in the West in terms of data privacy and security,” said Charles Bark (CEO of Hinounou, a digital healthcare platform trying to help seniors live healthier lives)

• China's transition from manufacturing hub to tech hotbed has largely been driven by government policies.

• Collaboration between industry and academia in Zhongguancun, China’s Silicon Valley, has created a nurturing environment for start-ups.

• The country's immense domestic market is an environment in which competition drives success.


With a median age of 38, China is not as young as the other Asian demographic giant, India, whose median age is just under 27. The demographic picture in China is an inverted pyramid caused by China’s one-child policy, launched in 1979.

China has the 4-2-1 crisis: four grandparents for every two parents for every one child.

One child is the recipient of two generations of money, love, attention, dreams — and huge amounts of pressure result in generational spending power that is pretty astounding

According to both McKinsey and Bain, China will account for roughly half of all global luxury spending by 2025

Start a Tech Train

See You at The top


Sunday, May 30, 2021

Leadership Captured

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom” (Viktor E. Frankl,  1984 ).



The first layer of skills a good leader must master are internal: managing himself as an individual. This includes physical health, emotional balance, self-knowledge – everything that he brings along with him to each meeting, each decision, each public event.  

A good leader is vulnerable and knows that the best answers very often don’t come from the top officers, but rather come from individuals who are closest to the client, closest to the problems and opportunities. He activates a rewarding dialogue between these forces 


  • A good leader knows that growth and efficiency can be allies, not antagonists. he Properly manages the push for efficiency to free up capital directed at revenue and strategic growth options that will increase his enterprise value.

  • A good leader knows that the cheapest capital you can get is money that’s not tied up in bills you pay too soon, receivables you collect too slowly, and inventory you don’t need.


  • A good leader understands the potential implications of technology on the company, the industry, the global market but he also understand how that technology will impact a single employee or task inside his organization


  • A good leader send his words into battle as a sheild and sword, his shield becomes so effective that he rarely has a need for the sword


Albert Einstein admitted, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” 


Stay Curious and See You at the Top

Saturday, April 24, 2021

The New Digital Era

 “We can’t only hire superstars. We also have to create them and enable them. It’s a huge leadership task and I see it as the number one priority.”................Wolf-Henning Scheider is the CEO of ZF Friedrichshafen


The Fortune 500 List; Since its inception in 1955 only 53 companies remain, that’s just below 11%. All of the others have either gone bankrupt, merged, or have just dropped off the list

We will succeed in the digital era only if we engage with enthusiasm and welcome the ideas and opportunities that digital tools, data analysis, and the concept of legitimacy bring. Technology and AI will free up our time and resources and allow us to focus on the people inside of organizations 

Take the case of Accenture; which automated over 17,000 jobs yet didn’t replace a single employee. Instead, these employees were upskilled and retrained to be more like strategic advisors to assist clients understand the numbers generated by AI.

Take Cryptocurrency; it is powerful because it lets us summon up large pools of capital by collective economic will, and these pools of capital are, at the beginning, not controlled by any person. Rather, these pools of capital are controlled directly by concepts of legitimacy.

The Concept of legitimacy:

In general, legitimacy arises because anything that gains legitimacy is psychologically appealing to most people. 

  • Legitimacy by brute force: someone convinces everyone that they are powerful enough to impose their will and resisting them will be very hard. 
  • Legitimacy by continuity: if something was legitimate at time T, it is by default legitimate at time T+1.
  • Legitimacy by fairness: something can become legitimate because it satisfies an intuitive notion of fairness. 
  • Legitimacy by process: if a process is legitimate, the outputs of that process gain legitimacy (eg. laws passed by democracies are sometimes described in this way).
  • Legitimacy by performance: if the outputs of a process lead to results that satisfy people, then that process can gain legitimacy (eg. successful dictatorships are sometimes described in this way).Legitimacy by participation: if people participate in choosing an outcome, they are more likely to consider it legitimate. 

Note that legitimacy is a descriptive concept; something can be legitimate even if you personally think that it is horrible. 

Defining legitimacy:

Legitimacy is a pattern of higher-order acceptance. An outcome in some social context is legitimate if the people in that social context broadly accept and play their part in enacting that outcome, and each individual person does so because they expect everyone else to do the same.

With the successful debut of Coinbase the guardians of the financial sector are poised to greatly intensify their efforts to regulate the booming borderless cryptocurrency sector.

We must challenge the irresponsible use of technology undermining our societies and democracies.

As we move into a new digital industrial age, we have an opportunity to change course and usher in a more transparent, democratic era of technology. Global technology governance will not be achieved by political actors alone

 – it also requires a grassroots movement in the tech community.

 See You at the Top

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Creative Client Relationships

True and False are attributes of speech, not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither Truth nor Falsehood..........Thomas Hobbes (English philosopher 1588-1679)

The art of writing and speaking brings clarity, passion and vision to the act of living

Leverage your current client relationships to drive new business by creating a personal and human connection

We have learned that marketing messages need to be personally relevant, aligned to an individual’s situation and values, as opposed to just demographics, such as age and gender. 

EY has identified five different cohorts of consumers:

  • Affordability first (32% of consumers): Living within their means and budget, focusing less on brands and more on product functionality.
  • Experience first (12%): Living in the moment to make the most of life, often making them open to new products, brands, and experiences.
  • Health first (25%): Protecting their health and that of their family, choosing products they trust to be safe and minimizing risks in the way that they shop.
  • Society first (15%): Working together for the greater good, buying from organizations they find to be honest and transparent.
  • Planet first (16%): Trying to minimize their impact on environment and buying brands that reflect their beliefs.

Utilizing customer segmentation and personas can bring deeper insights to media strategies and creative marketing approaches. Better still, these insights can be carried through to inform the full customer journey.

We must use data as the fuel yet respect the craft of storytelling to drive meaningful human connections. 

The data also suggest that the appeal of cash is decreasing as they are expensive to print, manage and store, eventually cash will be replaced by something in digital format. 

A marketing message that offers digital payment option including crypto will connect instantly with your clients

 See You at the Top

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

Think...

I am not here to think but to be, feel, live............Johann Gotfried Von Herder (1744---1803) German critic and philosopher

As we enter a new decade, we must cultivate our culture and go forward with agility, creativity and a beginner’s mind  




Hope these Nuggets will help you Cultivate a New Normal and keep you Thinking:


  • An immersive workspace is no longer limited to a desk in our Offices; the 9-to-5 workday and the employee experience of meeting rooms and snacks.


  • In a matter of weeks, technologies that once seemed futuristic became part of our everyday lives. The pandemic turned the entire tech jargon into a catalog of solutions that would keep families and friends connected, businesses operational and health care running for patients. 


  • Nations should launch a digital currency – and back it with digital gold. More broadly, champion decentralized cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum to attract international capital, strengthen monetary policy, deter financial fraud, accelerate technological development


  • Technology capitals and financial centers like Switzerland and Singapore have taken positions that are highly favorable to cryptocurrency. The right crypto policy would not cause capital flight but capital landing.

 

  • The World Bank: “Cryptocurrencies and blockchain protocols are part of a tidal wave of new technologies that is changing the way production and commerce are organized.”


  • US Treasury Secretary: “Bitcoin is here to stay” and the “financial industry will adopt the technology underpinning bitcoin.”


  • China is quickly closing the once formidable lead the U.S. maintained on AI research. Chinese researchers now publish more papers on AI and secure more patents than U.S. researchers do. 


  • Any computer brings with it the risk of hacking. This is true of our computers and phones, and it’s also true about all of the Internet-of-Things devices, social media that are increasingly part of our lives. Unconnected options are increasingly hard to find including cars. 


  • We must nurture our freedom every day, and defend our institutions against the corrosive power of hate speech, of disinformation, fake news and incitement to violence. In a world where polarizing opinions are the loudest, it is a short step from crude conspiracy theories


  • While any form of exercise has been shown to activate the brain, when you weigh what activity you can do almost every day, with little preparation, minimal effort, no special equipment, and that can contract or expand to fit the exact amount of time you have available, it’s walking. It is a proven creativity booster


Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, William Wordsworth, and Aristotle were all obsessive walkers, using the rhythm of walking to help them generate ideas. 

 See You at the Top
https://scroll.cashfxgroup.com

Tuesday, January 19, 2021

Thriving Thru Challenges

Coughs and Sneezes spread Diseases, Trap the Germs in your Handkerchief ....... World War 2 Health Slogan (1942)
Collaborations are increasingly between humans and machines while most assets and devices are now located outside the old “walls” of the organization. The cybersecurity mesh should enable any person or thing to securely access and use their digital asset, no matter where it is located. 

  A key question for your growth plan: 
• If you were a direct competitor to yourself, what would you do to steal market share? 

  Key Decisions around your Collective Organizational debt: 
• Social debt — Suboptimal activity or a sustained negative impact on the organization’s ability to address social, societal and community issues. 
• Process debt — Suboptimal activity or process that might have some benefits, but generates a sustained negative impact on cycle time, error rates, quality, consistency, complexity or customer experience. 
• Data debt — Lack of, or suboptimal access to, current or accurate data within the demand latency period. 
• Talent debt — Lack of talent (human workers, augmented humans or virtual workers) in either the quantity, quality or ability to scale to fuel optimization or growth. 
• Architecture debt — Suboptimal solutions from an optimized architectural construct. This may lead to security issues, latency and redundancy (in applications, infrastructure, instances, APIs, licensing or subscription costs). 
• Technical debt — Deviation of an application from any nonfunctional requirement. 

  Key information for your investment plan: 
 • London’s population is expected to decline for the first time in the 21st century; there could be fewer babies born in 2021 than in any year since records began. 
• Chip backlog/shortage for technology related industry, Taiwan and South Korea are the global leaders in computer chip production. 
• The Central Bank of Iran was the first central bank to publicly announce bitcoin purchases, In addition to institutional investors, other central banks may begin buying bitcoin 

 Organizations should resolve challenges around integration, security and privacy issues that prevent them from efficiently moving their AI practices from prototypes to production. 

 See You at the Top
https://scroll.cashfxgroup.com