Today is the last Friday of the teaching period for this academic year. I would like to close this academic year’s Friday Email series by covering more applications and problems of technology. The purpose of this sharing of yet another longer than wanted email (my apology!) is to hopefully remind you that there are often two sides of a story – the good and the bad (the bright and dark), and it is up to us to utilize technologies wisely and ethically! Please note that the list can be very long. I only chose four “stories”.
One very serious problem nowadays is the technology-assisted identity fraud. Imagine one day you answered a call from a familiar voice, or you saw a video of the president talking, only to find out later that they are deepfakes. Neither the voice nor the video are from the person you knew, but rather make-ups with AI technology! A recent survey in the US found that 46% of the respondents’ companies have experienced synthetic identify fraud! When asked if this is a big threat, 88% said yes! (See Statista article: https://www.statista.com/chart/32108/experiences-views-of-experts-on-advanced-identity-fraud-methods/) If you think this is not scary enough, consider the voting of the next President of the United States being influenced by AI. You can see in the article from Politico (https://www.politico.eu/article/deepfakes-distrust-disinformation-welcome-ai-election-2024/) that someone asked “What is the usefulness of a technology that can produce such realistic images, and how does it outweigh the potential harm?”, and the answer is “It really is unclear!”. So, why do people develop such AI technology???
In a recent article on Fortune magazine (https://fortune.com/2024/04/19/goldman-sachs-boss-wants-coders-study-philosophy/?utm_content=press_reference&utm_medium=email&utm_source=list_alert), the chief information officer of Goldman Sachs (one major investment bank), Marco Argenti, expressed the need for the IT engineers to study philosophy well in order to make AI technology really usable given its complexities. And by usable, of course, he did not mean AI is not useful. Rather, he meant the “coders” (engineers) have to learn philosophy well to be capable of “debating” with a stubborn AI. Funny how this is put! That actually reflects how it is possible for AI advancement to go too far that human can lose control.
Another problem, which is more for the global tech industry, is the shockingly fragile supply chain for semiconductors. You might have heard about rare earth minerals, a core element for chip production. China, along with a few other Asian countries, has the largest reserve of rare earth minerals. During the pandemic lockdown, China’s zero-COVID policy meant that chip production had significantly shrunk, resulting in a micro-chip bottleneck. All electronic devices, from gaming consoles to smartphones to cars were in shortage. Tech firms are now wary of what other supply shortage will impact them to the same significant degree.
Next, let’s consider geopolitical risk. Iran recently had a major drone strike on Israel, of which over 90% were shot down by Israeli. What does that mean? War with technology! Civilians can be killed without soldiers opening fire!
On the bright side, though, as we are in Macau, we should be proud of those who dare to continue to push Macau further towards the technology frontier. One example is a technological startup, cofounded by an engineer from Macau, which makes use of drones to check the “health” of the buildings in Macau. This is an effective, safe, and cost-saving solution to check for the wear-and-tear of the old buildings. Its business has already expanded very quickly to Shanghai and other cities in China. (See https://www.macaubusiness.com/drone-missions/) Again, innovate wisely and ethically!
Good luck to your examinations, and then a great summer! See you in the next academic year!
(Sorry that this is going to be longer than usual. I just can’t stop when talking about technology!)
Most, if not all, of us are very used to enjoying technology advancement, very often without considering how many hurdles their developers and inventors have faced, or whether we are even right in enjoying, or over-enjoying, the new technologies. To continue the sharing of topics on technology, here are some examples of how difficult and/or uncertain it is to advance technologies.
I will start with autonomous vehicles (AV). Think about getting on a driverless taxi! Sounds great! Should be safe, I guess! No need to worry about the taxi driver not helpful or impolite, I’m sure! A recent research commissioned by the U.S. Chamber of Progress predicted that there will be 9 million AVs in the next 15 years, creating 114,000 jobs. Good! But is it really safe? More tests and better technology in the sensing systems are needed to ensure safety. On top of this, AVs will drive drivers out of their jobs. Ahhhh? What will they do then?
Next recent technological advancement is quantum computing, which is totally different from the computing we are all familiar with. Quantum computers will be unimaginably far more powerful than our current computing facilities. But before we can see how useful (and fast) it is, we need more fundamental research in its algorithm, to build and use them in quantum computers. Right now, it is just “too young and expensive to be practical”. It also needs sound regulations. More importantly, however, are a majority of us ready to learn the new technology? Do not forget, human beings in general are reluctant to change!
Next is about cryptocurrency and blockchain. The origin of this is, to certain extent, from those who are not happy about the central banks and the banking industry controlling people’s flow of wealth. Blockchain being a public distributed ledger can trace back the whole flow of the funds without having any particular person or unit controlling the flow. The idea, together with cryptocurrencies, is good. However, whether it is really a good way of wealth transfer or storage is still yet to be discovered. We all heard about bitcoins. Is it a good storage of wealth? Consider it being priced over USD 60,000 at one time, only to drop to USD 18,000 or less, and then over USD 70,000 recently. Imagine buying a house with bitcoins and experience the nose-dive and then upsurge in “value” just because of bitcoin fluctuation.
The last technology to be shared this week is AI in general. The advancement in AI will definitely create huge demands on internet infrastructure, such as data centers, networks, and certainly a lot of energy. Furthermore, Tom Wheeler, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, US, who has been long promoting net neutrality (i.e. regulations requiring all “internet service providers to treat all web traffic equally”) actually asked ChatGPT about how important it is to have net neutrality given the advancement of AI. Guess what? ChatGPT responded, “As AI continues to evolve and become more integral in our daily lives, maintaining an open and equal internet becomes even more crucial. Net neutrality not only supports the equitable development and deployment of AI, but also ensures the benefits of AI technologies are accessible to all. Promoting innovation, fairness and competition in the digital age.” The question is how it could be achieved. Tom Wheeler has been pushing for it, and still has not succeeded.
I shall leave these technologies to you to think of their pros and cons to the society. Hope to cover more technological news in the future.
Please also feel free to share your knowledge and views about other technological advancement.
More about AI this week. In an AI driven working environment with so much self-manufactured work, people seem to be very excited about using AI to help them with their work extensively. Yet, they are also lost about what they can actually do, while business problems are still not solved. More than half of the Gen-Z (meaning you!) workers found that their bosses were often too busy to talk to them about their career-development. So, half of these workers sought for advice from AI chatbots.
A recent research paper by the Upwork Research Institute suggests the Hollywood model in which different people with various expertise would be gathered to create a movie. Think of who are needed for Oppenheimer and Barbie. Likewise, organizations need to form project teams. We should expect AI to help us with routine and more straightforward decision making so that we can focus on strategies in a team, with every level of participants understanding how to contribute as a team with their expertise, while aided with AI.
Now, think about what major you are in. How do you think AI will disrupt your career?
April is the last month of this academic year before your exams. I would like to use these few weeks to talk about AI, a term that used to mean technology advancement several years ago to something within day-to-day expectation now.
AI has disrupted workplace and our living in many unexpected ways. For instance, large language models (LLMs) are found to be quicker and more accurate in reviewing contracts than lawyers. In other cases, some managers saved a lot of time by using generative AI tools to write the performance reviews of workers, and can therefore focus on meeting and chatting with their workers. But then, there is another side of the story. Pissarides Review based in the United Kingdom found that introduction of new technologies would affect workers’ wellbeing because of increased job insecurity, loss of meaning at work, and reduced feelings of autonomy.
If you want to embrace technology advancement rather than feeling intimidated, then not only should you work hard on your studies, but you should also practice more thinking and reasoning.
Happy weekend!
I am well aware that you as HCers are in general more resilient and persevere than many others. So I probably do not need to remind you to stay positive and smart. Yet, as human beings, being positive and smart 100% of the time is perhaps next to impossible. You too need a break occasionally. That is why I still think it might help to share with you the following quote, which you can take it out to remind yourselves whenever needed. Here goes:
Give! But don’t allow yourself to be used.
Love! But don’t allow your heart to be abused.
Trust! But don’t be naïve.
Listen! But don’t lose your own voice.
I cannot cite the source because many people have been using it, but none is the author.
The Easter break will start next week. So, I will not send you any Friday emails until after the Easter break. Wish you a pleasant and enjoyable Easter.
We all know that the world is ever-changing. We also know that we are both trying to save the world by going green and simultaneously damaging the world (think of how much water, tissue and plastic bags and lunch boxes we consumed during the 3 pandemic years). Here are three interesting graphs which I got from Statista, a platform that has a lot of interesting and sometimes very useful statistics of the world. These graphs are about:
(1) The most spoken languages versus most used languages on internet (https://www.statista.com/chart/26884/languages-on-the-internet/)
(2) Popularity of water bottles around the world (https://www.statista.com/chart/31771/respondents-who-say-they-regularly-drink-bottled-water/), and
(3) Most expensive cities to live in (https://www.statista.com/chart/13279/the-cities-with-the-highest-cost-of-living/).
Please scroll down to see the graphs.
Enjoy the statistics and information, and your weekend!
Today is March 8. What is special about it? It is the International Women’s Day. So what? Today is the second of the three days of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Singapore. Not a fan of her? No worries. This email might still be interesting to you.
Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour started almost one year ago, on March 17, 2023 in the US, and will end on December 8, 2024 in Vancouver, covering 152 shows in five continents! Although this is still not the longest tour ever, no one can deny the economic boost her concerts have brought to the city. The concert movie called Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, released in summer 2023, has become the most seen concert movie. By last summer, when she was still touring within the US, the Wall Street Journal has already named the financial impact brought by her concerts as “Taylornomics”, and Fortune (the magazine) called it “TSwift Lift”. Even the Federal Reserve (Fed for short, being the central bank of the US) expressed giving her credit for boosting the economy. The latest term is now Swiftonomics. This has also happened in Melbourne and Tokyo just last month. Even before the Singapore leg takes place, people are already talking about how much the Singaporean government has chipped in, and what the officials have done to make sure she goes to Singapore. In the neighboring city, Hong Kong, however, people asked the government officials why the “City of World-Class Events” (being Hong Kong, promoted by the government officials) could not attract famous singers like Taylor Swift.
Surprising or not? Happy International Women’s Day!
This week, I would like to share what leaders think about the traits that shape leaders who they are. Let me emphasize my view about leadership once again. An important reflection about yourselves is not whether you want to be leaders, but whether you have the capabilities and be prepared to be leaders. A CEO is not necessarily a leader unless he/she can lead. Only a few among many eventually become leaders. Leadership is not narrowly defined as being in a top position of an organization or a structure, but rather taking the lead for advancement whenever and wherever needed.
In the book named CEO Excellence written by Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra, published by Scribner in 2022, the common traits of the 67 world highest-performing leaders being interviewed all have the following:
- Never stop learning
- Never stop being curious
- Willing to try new things, and gain experiences from doing so
- Their experiences often result in being able to recognize patterns, and being more resilient
- Able to separate themselves from setbacks so as to see that the end of failure is success by continuously reflecting on the lessons learnt (i.e. act like an outsider)
- Good at teamwork, and more importantly, make the team, not themselves, the star
- Focus on the future, not lingering in the past, be it success or failure
- Stay humble
Hope you will keep this in mind even if you do not aim to be leaders, because these traits will in general make you better persons who will be useful to the world.
Happy Year of the Dragon! Wish you a very fruitful and happy New Year!
A way to welcome you back on campus in this new year is to remind you of what is going on in the world lately. Safety and security can become a luxury! Heard about Munich Security Conference (MSC) 2024? Started 60 years ago, this conference is where country leaders and decision makers gather to discuss pressing security issues that are currently affecting the world. When you think of “security” + “international”, you may think of the current Israel Gaza war, or the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, both of which have drawn intervention from all main powers in the world. War is only one type of security issues of mankind. The MSC 2024, which was held on February 16-18, covered the following main security issues, being:
– Defense – Stopping war, maintaining peace globally
– Global Order – Change in distribution of power globally
– Human Security – Think of how Jewish students born in the US are scared to go to school in even the top universities such as Harvard because of antisemitism. Think of the fear one has when he/she walks back home at night in a city that is not safe.
– Sustainability – What should we do to combat climate change so that people living at the coastal areas will not have their homes washed away? Think of how people everywhere in the world can have enough food every day.
– Technology – Think of the necessary speedy changes in regulations and governance to ensure fairness, ethics, and human privacy and rights given the extremely rapid advancement in technology.
Want to learn more? Here’s the link: https://securityconference.org/en/
I wrote about WEF and Gillian Tett recently. Did you have the curiosity to learn more and dig further in? According to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, curiosity is “a strong desire to know something”. People associate curiosity to good personal traits. Curiosity is necessary for the world to advance. A lot of discoveries are results of curiosity. But discoveries will not exist if you are only curious but have no courage to find the answers. Nevertheless, if you are always curious about anything and any person you encounter, and you have the courage. I am sending you this email this week to remind you that not all curiosities are good. Some are bad, and some others are useless. Finding yourself curious for the useless is not a problem if it does not harm or affect anyone or anything, although you would be wasting time and effort. It is the bad curiosity that I would like to alert you.
What are bad curiosity? Some would make you insecure. For example, you might have very strong urge to know because you are afraid to be left out. In other cases, the answer to curiosity can be something that excites you or disappoints you. The emotional highs and lows might affect your day. Being emotionally high might not be as good as it sounds. What a healthy person should have is a tranquil heart, or at least one that does not always goes between highs and lows all the time. Some curiosity are addictive, making you feel good at first, but feeling more and more miserable later. Examples are (1) checking social media all the time, (2) being obsessed with celebrity gossips, or (3) being very absorbed in gossips of your friends and people around you. It is this third one that I particularly would like to remind you of. Being curious about others’ lives is intrusion.
I hope you are always curious for knowledge and about life, not about other people!
Happy Chinese New Year! Wish you and your families great health and great happiness!
Which RCs have you stayed in? One of the longest college systems is in Cambridge (FYI, Cambridge and Oxford are collectively referred as Oxbridge). One of the most famous and iconic colleges at the University of Cambridge is the King’s College. The other is probably the Trinity College where Isaac Newton stayed, and where tourists always ask for the apple tree under which Newton sat.
This week, I talk about the King’s College because it has a new provost, Dr. Gillian Tett, starting in October, 2023. Why is this special? A provost is the chief officer of the college, who is therefore usually filled by a senior professor. Dr. Gillian Tett is not an academic, nor has she taught full-time at a university. She is trained as an anthropologist (her PhD in anthropologist is from Cambridge), but worked as a financial journalist for the Financial Times. She has won numerous awards, including the Columnist of the Year (2014), Journalist of the Year (2009) and Financial Journalist of the Year (2008). I suppose this is a good example of how the higher education system should embrace and collaborate with the fast-moving world in order to bring better education to the next generation, who in turn will be in charge of building a better and more sustainable world.
Speaking of the King’s College, I would like to point out that the term “residential college” is not necessarily used everywhere that has similar system. For example, if you were in Cambridge and you told people that you were familiar with the “RC system”, they might not understand what you meant. So, how do the various residential college systems differ? Are you curious to know? Why don’t you do some search and study? A hint for you: Yale University and Harvard in the US, Australian National University in Australia, and Chinese University of Hong Kong are very good examples.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) is held in Davos this week. Where is Davos? Switzerland. What is the WEF for? I covered WEF before. So, this time would be only a very brief outline. For those of you who study in fields other than finance and/or economics, please do not worry. WEF is related to everyone. Here are some topics that WEF have covered (have a look at https://www.weforum.org/agenda/):
- Close the extreme poverty and empowerment gap
- Tackle the gap between women’s and men’s health
- Reimagining the connected world
- Impact of Generative AL to human and industry
- Sustainability, and action to tackle climate change
- Global cooperation
- Impact of digitization and tech-enabled operations on jobs in the future
You see, a lot of leaders of different organizations, profit or non-profit, are trying to help build a better world. And the world is in constant need of talents to join the team of leaders. The world counts on you! But the world is also a very competitive battlefield. While you are smart and capable, there are also many others who could do what you can do, and perhaps better. This is why I would like to remind you to stay humble, try to learn as much as you can, think as far as you can, and then contribute whenever you have the chance.
For a new start of your semester, here’s another book to share: Like the Flowing River by Paulo Coelho. It is not so much about sharing this excellent book, but rather about the few lines extracted from it (and some interpretation of a good friend of mine), which reminds us of how we should care about ourselves and others, and never think of ourselves as either too nontrivial or too unimportant. Simply remember that each of us is unique, and can contribute to the world (to our families, our cities, our countries, and our planet) in different ways.
First is this line:
“Sometimes, the invisible books, born out of generosity towards other people, are as important as those that fill our libraries. That is how it should be for all of us – never forget to look after our fellow human beings.”
Then, this part of the story which my friend, Professor Joseph Ooi of the National University of Singapore, pointed out in his New Year reflection from the book:
Holding up a pencil, a grandmother said to her grandson: “I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up.” Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It didn’t seem very special. He responded, “but it’s just like any other pencil”.
That depends on how you look at things. The pencil has 5 qualities which if you manage to hang on to them, will make you a person who is always at peace with the world:
(1) You are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand of God, and He always guides us according to His will.
(2) Now and then, I must stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he’s much sharper. So, you, too, must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because they will make you a better person.
(3) The pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing; it helps to keep us on the road to justice.
(4) What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.
(5) It always leaves a mark. In same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark, so try to be conscious of that in your every action.
Welcome back on campus for your second semester of the academic year 2023/2024!
I hope you have had some well-deserved rest after the hectic examination period! In the month leading to the Christmas, if you listened to world music channels, you might have heard “Do They Know It’s Christmas Time At All” hundreds of times. It is sung by Band Aid. You know them? Probably too old for you! Well, Band Aid is a group of famous British and Irish celebrity singers in 1984 aiming to raise money to fight against famine in Ethiopia at that time.
Forty years have passed. Famine is probably not much heard of these recent years. But is everyone on earth well fed? Some of you might always leave your meals unfinished. Others of you might find your appetite always greater than what the food outlets serve you. In any case, you probably have never experienced continuous hunger. We should feel so much blessed to live in this part of the world where food is never in shortage.
Let me share with you some figures released by McKinsey & Co. for Thanksgiving Day (Yeah, sorry, McKinsey again! But don’t you think it is really resourceful?):
- Upward of 3 billion people worldwide lacked access to adequate food in 2020, according to the United Nation Food and Agricultural Organization.
- As of 2020, some 730 million people were in extreme poverty
- 7 billion people, or 60% of the global population, live below the threshold needed to meet individuals’ essential needs and feel safe (i.e. the economic empowerment line)
To translate it into a world village with a population of 100, 30 people have never eaten enough food, and 60 of them have never felt safe and lived with basic needs! Appalling! It has also been reported that the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to the even worsening situation.
So, treasure what you are having, and contribute whatever you can to the community and the world. You do not need to only make donations. Your help to build a greener world would be crucial. When the world is less polluted, climate change will be less severe, more places that used to be able to grow plants but not anymore can be revived for agricultural purposes. Maldives will not sink… Act now! Act fast!
You must be both quite happy that this semester is finally ending and anxiously busy preparing for your exams. As in the past, this will be my last Friday email of this semester. I meant to finish the semester by sharing one more point from the book by Adam Grant. But then, the COP28 is open yesterday. So, I decide to talk about both.
First is about “Think Again” from Adam Grant. Remember I shared about confidence versus competence three weeks ago? It turns out that many competent people do not believe they are capable. Adam Grant introduced the “imposter syndrome”. Studies found that people who are self-identified as impostors turn out to be more empathetic, respectful and professional. They are more effective in asking questions and sharing information, and in more caring and friendly ways. So, if you think you are not good enough in some tasks, think again. Are you really not good enough? If so, learn and improve yourselves. But please also consider whether it is more likely that you are just having impostor syndrome.
Second, about COP28. I hope you can do a quick search about what COP28 is. The Paris Agreement was adopted at the COP21 held in 2015 with which many countries agreed to cooperate to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees, and reaching net zero by 2050. This means cutting greenhouse gases by 25% to 50% by 2030 compared to greenhouse gas emission in 2019. However, the latest estimate is a meager 11% by 2030. Ironically, several countries that are technologically advanced and wealthy enough to help reduce carbon emission are exactly the ones that contribute the most emission. Those small and less developed countries, particularly those surrounded by waters, contributed minimal greenhouse gas, but are most prone to significant impact from climate change.
Lastly, I hope you will excel in your examinations, and then have really nice and fun rest in the Christmas and New Year break! So, an early season’s greetings: Merry Christmas!!
Talk to you again next year!
Let’s go back to the book by Adam Grant called Think Again. My sharing today as about four groups of professionals: preachers, politicians, prosecutors, and scientists. Adam Grant mentioned that this idea was from his colleague Phil Tetlock.
How are these professions to do with you? Each of us will be one of these four, especially the first three, at different times. When what you always strongly believe in is being challenged, what will you do? Preach! What about when you spot flaws in other people’s argument or reasoning? You prosecute! You establish arguments to prove that they are wrong. What if you want to win others’ belief and/or trust? You become a politician. You lobby until people believe in you or stand by your thoughts. What do scientists do then? Consider the above three groups. Preachers and politicians always want to reach their goals without urging for evidence. Prosecutors work on evidence, but often attack the other side. Scientists on the other hand always require experiments in order to reach some objective outcomes and implications.
The message here is that everyone can be in one of the above modes. But to be right, you probably should consider being scientists when you want to start preaching, prosecuting, or lobbying. Think again!
If you do not get my message, please feel free to write to me. If you do, or you think you do, please think more, and observe you and people around you to see if you can tell when they (or you) are preachers, politicians, and prosecutors. How often are you scientists?
What do you think the title of this email is about? As you have already become members of HC, I would like to remind you of the goals of joining HC. Our mission is
To nurture high flying students into globally competitive leaders and intellectual achievers committed to collaborative and creative thinking for Macao and beyond
You do not become global leaders and intellectual achievers automatically by being HCers. Exactly for this reason, we have tried our best to organize seminars and activities that could help open your minds to be global citizens who commit. For instance, on Wednesday, we organized this year’s Honours Forum in which Prof. Luciano Rila of University College London (UCL) spoke about “Paying Forward: Nurturing Inclusive Environments In STEM for a New Generation LGBTQ+ Scientists”.
Are you even aware of such an event? The Honours Forum is supposed to be one of the more important seminars. Why LGBTO+? Why STEM scientist? As high flying students, and future global leaders and intellectual achievers, you are expected to know about a wide range of subjects and topics. I am very disappointed that, despite having over 350 HCers in total, I only see 10% of you here at the Forum. Do you think you know a lot already? Enough to represent outstanding high-flyers! NO!!! Overconfident people tend to think the values of a lot of opportunities are too trivial for them, and wasting their time. If you think so, the chance of you becoming high-flyers will be smaller. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know!
Even worse is when you have signed up to come, and then not coming at all. This is the same as breaking a promise. Outstanding and successful people will not break promises, whether big or small. But guess what, the worst are those who came and sat for only a few minutes before deciding that they did not want to “waste more time” and left. This is utterly bad for any responsible person. This is disgraceful and disrespectful to the speaker!
As you are already HCers, I hope you can show me you are worth being treasured as HCers! You have choices. But once chosen, please honour your choices. Behave as real HCers, please!
Greetings from Budapest! I am here for a conference, and finally had a chance to start this highly anticipated book on the plane. “Think Again” is written by Adam Grant (published in 2021), the famous organizational psychologist at the Wharton School. It is really a page turner. The first point I would like to share is the following on page 37:
“In theory, confidence and competence go hand in hand. In practice, they often diverge. … In a meta-analysis of ninety-five studies involving over a hundred thousand people, women typically underestimated their leadership skills, while men overestimated their skills.”
Basically, what he meant is that some people tend to have confidence but not competence, while others are the other way round. He added that being on the extremes of confidence (i.e. having either too much or too little) left people reluctant to rethink their plans. The ideal level of confidence probably lies somewhere in between.
I am aware that I have talked about overconfidence in the past. But I am sort of repeating it here in the hope of both reminding you and trying to pave a way for my mails in the coming weeks about the ideas from this book.
Hope you have a chance to enjoy the book which even Bill Gates recommended.
Have you ever found your classmates or teammates very frustrating when doing group projects? I recently came across an article from the Inspiring Minds series of the Harvard Business Publishing Education related to this question. I hope you could reduce your frustration after reading the following summarized version of the article. Basically, you can use the following checklist to see if you have balanced your own accountability with compassion.
- Have you been clear about your expectations? Have everyone been clear? Do you and your peers really understand each other’s expectations?
- Are your expectations reasonable? For example, is the workload and/or deadline fair? Has everyone been outspoken about the potential difficulties?
- Are you really focusing on the ultimate goal or outcome? You should not focus on how others’ work is done. Remember, autonomy is important for everyone. What you should do is to focus on your part, with the aim that all team members contribute and collaborate towards achieving the same goal and outcome.
- Do you know your peers well? Are you truly aware of their knowledge, strength, skills, and personalities?
- Are you biased on your peers? That is, do you give favor to one, but treat others less well?
- Are your feedbacks and suggestions clear, firm and kind? Criticisms are never easy to digest. Constructive comments on the other hand can be really constructive.
Please do not forget, even if you are very intelligent, you are just one of the millions of intelligent people on earth. And who is to say your peers are less intelligent? Please, never be too confident of yourself. We Chinese have a saying, with word-by-word translation as, “There is always a mountain higher than the previous!”
Before being a good leader, you should be an excellent teammate first!
Have a great weekend!
As our second Friday email, I would like to talk about something trendy – Chat GPT!
Christian Terwiesch, a Wharton professor (Wharton means Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, which, of course, is a very good university), recently asked ChatGPT to come up with some product ideas. It turns out that ChatGPT was able to not only generate better ideas than his students, but faster and cheaper!!! Scared??? The question asked is, “Is ChatGPT a Better Entrepreneur than Most?”, which is the title of a recent article from Wharton.
But beyond being entrepreneur, a more serious issue is that AI seems to be equally creative, if not better. There have been a lot of discussions recently about what jobs AI could replace, and the general agreement is about those repetitive ones, and those that require accuracy and reasoning, but not those that need more creativity and human touch. This experiment above shows that creativity is not a weak spot for AI at all. So, what should human do? Avoid AI to keep our jobs? Professor Terwiesch suggests to make good use of generative AI, treat them as partners, and not treating them like a war between AI and human. After all, they might generate hundreds of ideas of which perhaps only five are good. We need human to make the choices. … At least for now!
Be prepared to live in this innovative world!
First, I would like to extend our welcoming arms to our new HCers. Welcome to our big HC family!!! You, who are new, might not be aware that I always send out emails to you on Fridays of teaching weeks because we do not have much time to meet, and yet I have a lot that I would like to share with you. If you are interested in what I shared before, please feel free to browse our HC website: https://hc.um.edu.mo/current-students/friday-emails/academic-year-2022-2023/ . I would like to specifically suggest you to read the email about how to write proper emails.
As this is my first Friday email for the academic year 2023/2024, and I want to keep it short, I would like to share with you the following picture (which people have different colors for different versions, but the concept is the same). No matter which zone you are currently in, ultimately, as HCers, you will be expected to be in the “Growth Zone”, not just by me, but most people around you, and including yourselves. So, if you find yourselves in some other zones, please think and plan how you can eventually reach the Growth Zone.
Enjoy your weekend!