[W38] Executive courage, cognitive science, and a top MIT lecture

Hello,

I am Marcos, and this week I decided to start this newsletter. Every week I will drop some interesting content around technology and business. I thought compiling a summary of the week would be helpful for me. It hope it is also valuable to others.

Strategic courage in an age of volatility. This McKinsey article talks about the types of leaders that achieve better performance in volatile times. The quote from Ayrton Senna, "You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather, but you can when it's raining" suggests seeing crises as opportunities. The research points that defense-only postures lead to median company performance, and suggests the profile of successful leaders. "The best leaders and companies are ambidextrous: prudent about managing the downside while aggressively pursuing the upside." The rest of the article suggests management teams should push for three types of edges to create better performance: the insights edge (knowing more and deeper), the commitment edge (committing fast, reassessing often) and the execution edge (speed and quality).

Bias busters: When good intentions get derailed. A CEO received the resignation letter of their most senior VP, and is surprised by the negative feedback to him he sees in there. In this McKinsey article, leaders' bias is shown to sometimes blind leaders for the situation around.

How to Talk. Somehow I came across a list of MIT's top 5 classes, and this one is about how to talk. There is a great collection of precious insights on this talk, a provocative one being right at the beginning: "Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas, in that order. "

Events & Courses

World Summit AI is coming in October and the agenda looks great.

The human brain: Few course syllabi excited me as much as this one. It is an MIT course about how the brain builds the mind. What is mind? How the many parts of the brain contribute to that? These are but a few of the questions the course propose to answer.