The EFA Factors: My 2021 in 5 Books

 

Every year, I try to read 50 books. But in 2021, I could not fulfill that target because of business, examinations and other typical engagements. However, I read 32 books in 2021.

I prioritized ‘new economy’ books; that is books on emerging fields such as Artificial Intelligence. Fintech, Blockchain, Product Management and Marketing, though I read other books on organization development, leadership and management. In this piece, I will highlight and share takeaways on 5 out of those 32 books. These 5, I will say had the greatest implications for me.

I have also created what I call the EFA factors. These factors are Empowerment, Flexibility and Agility. EFA Factors will help guide managers in light of direction of events, developments and changes in the world. 

Please see the list and overview, as well as my takeaways on 5 books below:

1. Fintech for Dummies by Susanne Christhi:

This book is a great book for beginners who want to understand the importance of Fintech (financial technology) and how it works. The author explains the components of Fintech, which are; Business Models (B2B, B2C, B2G), Finance segments (Insurance, Banking, Payments, Lending etc), and Technology (Microservices, API’s, Programming languages, Cloud, AI, Blockchain, Agile methodologies etc).

The writer explained that these components interact to help Fintech firms deliver new and cost effective services to target customers. The idea basically is that Fintech is the use of technology to deliver financial services to target customers, consumers, corporate organisations and government.

What makes Fintech important is that it gets around legacy technology problems of old financial institutions. It gives new firms the opportunity to innovate around specific financial services more efficiently than the banks and other financial service providers we used to know. Improving the lives of customers and adding greater value.

My Takeaway: Apparently, the use of Application Programming Interfaces( API’s), where programs can converse and exchange data and Agile thinking and tools such as Microservices, but to mention a few are critical in delivering these services, particularly API’s. Infact, the jury is out on the API economy, which would definitely be valued in billions of dollars.  And Fintech will hold the ace in advancing financial inclusion in underserved areas.

2. How to DeFi by CoinGecko

CoinGecko is a cryptocurrency platform which lists various digital assets for trading and they share
content and opinion on the digital currency ecosystem. In this book, they explain decentralized finance (DeFi).

The substance of the book is that traditional finance which is concentrated in the hands of a few organisations; banks, multilateral institutions, investment houses and insurance companies is being decentralized and managed using blockchain technologies, exchanges and tools such as smart contracts, tokens, initial coin offerings and decentralized autonomous organizations. Gone are the days when corporations control these financial services. The power is now being devolved to the average participants on blockchain.

My Takeaway: The promise of cryptocurrency and the blockchain is to take financial power and control from governments and other centralizing tendencies and give it to the people. I think this is working. But the state should still regulate to avoid financing of terror and fraud. But, the state and governments must not interfere unduly in how these DeFi platforms operate; giving way to centralization that is being avoided in the first place. These platforms are also part of the wave to create new wealth, away from the limitations of the order of Bretton Woods’s systems.

3. SuperIntelligence: Paths, Dangers and Strategies by Nick Bostrom:

This book is first about achieving “SuperIntelligence”. SuperIntelligence is simply a type of intelligence that achieves human-level machine intelligence and then surpasses it. Thereby making machines way more intelligent than human beings. Scary right?. This book explores paths for achieving and surpassing human-level machine intelligence. These paths include;

1. Whole Brain Emulation:  Where certain technologies are used to scan the complexities of the human brain and use of same on computers to carry out tasks. This technology is almost not available, but is a possibility.

2. Networks and Organisations: This is about our dependence on the vast networks of human intelligence sitting today in organisations, networks of individuals and on the internet, but this proves almost impossible because of management of the scale of internet content and data. There is also the problem of ego, status games and other human weaknesses that make distribution of intelligence limited.

3. Biological Cognition: Here we seek to improve human intelligence with gene editing, germ-line interventions, all with the sole objective of producing more efficient, intelligent beautiful and disease free human beings. There is also the use of brain enhancers such as nootropics and other stimulants to improve brain performance. However, there is an ethical burden with genetic synthesis and editing in many cases, and it may not be widely adopted for intelligence.

4. Artificial Intelligence: Many of us have heard and read about artificial intelligence. It is basically mimicry and automation of human thinking processes to achieve human level intelligence and carrying out tasks that humans can carry out. This in recent times has employed neural networks to automate tasks or perform activities. It is so pervasive that is regarded as neuromorphic AI because it tries to model the human brain. Scholars have made a distinction between weak AI and Strong AI.  Weak AI is AI that is applied in specific domains such as medicine, finance, supply chain etc. Meanwhile, General AI is AI that has achieved human level intelligence and that can function like a human and carry out tasks in all domains and just like humans act without thinking in certain situations.

Currently, artificial intelligence requires huge troves of data to provide better performance. This requires investment in hardware and deliberate data strategy to get the best results. According to Mckinsey, AI techniques hold a great promise to improve productivity in 19 sectors, across 9 business functions. The size of the opportunity has also be values to be $13trillion.

5. Brain-Machine Interface: This is simply the use of items such as chips in the brain. The goal is to excite and inhibit wanted and wanted brain processes, and interfering to make humans more intelligent. The common challenge with this is risk of fatality from hemorrhaging and redundancy of such chips, because the brain already has a lot of facility. The usefulness of this is still being debated.

My Takeaway: There is a prospect of reducing the number of weak human beings with genetic engineering. The weakness stated here alludes to proneness to disease and other biological inefficiencies. This is where gene editing can enable improvement in quality of embryo and a more efficient human. There is also the prospect of extracting gametes from stem cells such that parents can select the best performing embryo.

The goal of achieving SuperIntelligence can only be limited by scarcity of resources, and the prospect of a General AI may be far in the future.  However, it is the humble opinion of this writer that efforts in Weak AI must continue because we do not just need AI for AI, we need it to solve problems.

I also make a case that in developing countries where resources are more limited, public policy should prioritize AI for healthcare because of short lifespans, infant mortality and maternal mortality.

4. Public Policymaking by James Anderson

Public policy seems to be a preserve for academics and government policy makers, though its theory and evidence has serious implication for everyone. In this book, the author sets out the role of agenda setting and public policy theories to help the readers understand public policy.

Public policy simply refers to issues that affect the public and that the public seeks intervention. This can range from health, finance, environment to education etc.

The challenge then is that not all issues enjoy the same attention because of limited resources; financial and policy making machinery. We have limited revenues and limited amount of lawmakers and government agents. This means that the issues that receive the highest amount of advocacy or lobbying get moved up executive and legislative agenda, in democracies at least. The implication of this is that there are important and crucial issues that may not get attention because of these limitations.

Another point made in this book is that policy may be written or unwritten. Policy may be unwritten based on the behaviour of policy makers. Any practise or administrative pattern of government may be deemed to be policy. And infact, written policy may not be enforced or implemented as planned or abandoned altogether by successor government. This means public policy and its operation is largely behavioral.

My Takeaway: Civil society and change agents must appreciate the agenda setting element of advocacy for change in their campaigns. They must also note that not all policies are written. It will be prudent to assess behaviour at government agency levels to diagnose policy implementation problems.

 
 

5. Agile Software Development with Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle:

The authors document their journey towards Scrum under the Agile Software Development methodology. The recant a series of concepts such as sprint, iteration, sprint review, product backlog, scrum master, daily reviews amongst other corpus of scrum.

Scrum is a form of Agile Project Management which developed as an alternative to traditional/waterfall project management, where tasks are planned ahead of time and flexibility is low. This Waterfall system led to failure of many projects and frustrated customers.

Schwaber thought to resolve this problem, and engaged process consultant- Babatunde Ogunnaike who reviewed the software development process and told Schwaber that the software development process required an empirical process control instead of defined processs. In the empirical process, data is collected regularly (Daily Review and Iterations) and improvements are made.

Another influence was the work of Nonaka and Takeuchi in their Harvard Business Review article- The New Product Development Game. In this piece, they highlighted the tendency of Japanese firms to create products, piece by piece. That is functional software component is created after which other components are created and reviewed. In the end, a final product with all components is created. But the functional components can be deployed for use till the entire product has more features. This is what the concept of iteration means.

My Takeaway: Agile is a form of thinking which helps organisations build complete features in pieces and very fast, instead of waiting months long for one complete product without real time feedback. This thinking helps deploy products fast, with regular input and insight from team members. Agile then has been applied to project management and tools such as Microservices, and recently the practise of DevOps has sprung from it. The Agile methodology also gives more power to the team members to share insights and help the team get better, increasing overall output.

Final Thoughts

Success and growth in organisations and the global economy will depend on the EFA factors, namely; Empowerment, Flexibility and Agility.  Greater empowerment of employees will ensure that value is added across the value chain and throughout process points. More flexibility will ensure that mistakes can be corrected readily, while improvements will be readily acceptable. Agility will help ensure that organisations adapt readily to changes in the environment, thereby facilitating creation and delivery of relevant value in due time and at acceptable costs.

We now live in an EFA world.

Overall, the next frontier for global competitiveness lies in the concepts highlighted in this piece.

If you have questions, send an email to this writer at: babatopefaladeonikoyi@gmail.com