In its just-released 2015 Report titled What if I Told You, Goldman Sachs touts seven "pockets of discovery value", including three most disruptive innovations, for the next future. By implication, these are sources of the greatest investment opportunity for savvy investors, who are obviously the primary target of the report -- as, potentially, clients of Goldman Sachs.
Here are the Seven Pockets:
1. The Blockchain: "the core technology behind Bitcoin". Faces roadblocks but could possibly "disrupt everything"
2. Space: "once again the New Frontier", as launch costs fall dramatically -- as a result of the work of players such as Elon Musk
3. College Education: declining average return, based on a calculation of freshers' future wages as a % of "average wages expected" for graduates
4. Gen-Z: more numerous and more influential (in the US) than the Millennials
5. Flash Crash: Another one's on the way, spurred by global disconnects in exchange regulations
6. Lithium: "the New Gasoline" and "key enabler of the electric vehicle revolution"
7. The Cloud: a promising avenue for cancer cure
READ: Goldman Sachs ~ What if I Told You...
Saturday, January 30, 2016
Friday, January 29, 2016
Railway Raga: Locomotives, SGR and Bullet Trains
1. Introduction:
This post was drafted in the middle of December, 2015. It is being published today (January 29, 2016) without further ado, almost as it was then
Bullet trains were very much in the news recently, what with the Japan-India agreement, last December, to build a bullet train link between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. This is a distance of 550 km -- which the new, $14.7bn, investment will reduce from about 8 hours of travel-time to just 2. I just got the urge to seize the moment to share on twitter a few videos of bullet trains in Japan and elsewhere, and to indulge my interest in them. A couple of Japanese train stations quickly wormed their way into the visual array. And then it became necessary to add a historical touch to the whole kahuna, though this required a greater expenditure of time than I thought I should devote to this particular post, certainly right then. So be it. Then I shifted my platform from Twitter (which I will surely pivot back to when this post is done, whenever) to Blogger -- which allows for a more extended conversation with oneself et al. All this because Kenya's own SGR is on the way, so that we're feeling a kindred Ness of spirit with the rest of the high-speed world. So here we are: I thought the visuals would tell a better story of the awesomeness of the trains than any verbal account could.
Here's one of the videos that I tweeted: Video of a Japanese Below-Ground Train Station
Here's yet another: The Shinkansen Bullet Train, Maximum Speed 320 km/h
History's first passenger train, running on iron rails, was, by default rather than design, launched in Britain in 1830. The initial idea behind trains was not at all passenger travel, but rather the cost-effective delivery of cargo: heavy ware (coal, machinery, parts), or things, of all sorts. Indeed, the first train transport had been launched precisely for the movement of cargo a little earlier, in 1825. But serendipity had gotten in the way and changed the world, and the culture, of travel. Serendipity, in this case, materializing as a potent mix of imagination and a sudden, unprecedented, opportunity-driven urge in the manual cargo handlers on board to become themselves, and perhaps a few joy-rider friends, the very 'cargo', so to speak, that they were handling. The rest is that history.
Let's go back in time a little, in order to more appropriately come up to speed:
Before the fear of flying -- nowadays much remarked upon, since Erica Jong's best-selling 1970s book by that title -- there was in the mix, in earlier days, just as deep-rooted a fear of train travel in some people. Trains in and of themselves invoked existential fear, and not necessarily in those who newly traversed the countryside in them. Thus it is that at least one prominent leader in 19th-century rural America is on record fearfully remarking:
"As you well know, Mr. President....carriages
are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles per hour by "engines"
which in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort
their way through the countryside ,setting fire to crops, scaring the livestock
and frightening women and children. The Almighty certainly never intended that people
should travel of such breakneck speed" [Letter from the Government of New York to President
Andrew Jackson on the rail roads, quoted in Sir Frank Mcfadzean (1980: 92), "the Entrepreneur in the private and public Sectors" in Israel Kirzner et al (1980) Prime Mover of Progress: The Entrepreneur in Capitalism and Socialism. Lancing, Sussex: The Institute of Economic Affairs. [Quote also appears in World Economic Journal, Vol.2,
1979 p. 342].
Trains, and Zahara's father's long absences, are the reason she, Zahara, sang that iconic song, Loliwe. They are the reason a decision was made by the colonizer's agents, at the beginning of the 20th century, to locate Nairobi where it is so indubitably located even today. Trains are the reason I and my siblings grew up there/here.
Enough of the commonplace train. Let us now turn our attention to bullet trains.
2. Bullet Train: History and Documentaries:
JUST READ: Time's Brief History of Bullet Trains
3. Japan: Video ~ The Shinkansen Bullet Train (Maximum Speed 320 km/h):
4, European Version of Bullet Trains:
CLICK: A European version of the bullet train.
5. Shanghai, China Bullet Train (Video):
6. (a) Gautrain, Johannesburg (Video):
6. (b) Gautrain, NPRNews (Audio Coverage):
Listen Here
7. READ: Japan's High-Speed Trains Gaining Ground in US
8. Where we are With Kenya's high Speed Train Project?
READ: Update on Kenya's high speed train project
9. CONCLUSION:
Still waiting for the bullet (T)rain across the Rift
Thursday, January 28, 2016
Introduction to Advanced Training Techniques: CSO 589
This is the second 'edition' of the introduction to Advanced Training Techniques to appear on this blog. It too adopts a Question-and-Answer format; in this case one question and three broad answers.
Question: Why the focus on advanced training techniques?
Answer: First of all, training is a key pillar of investment in human resource. Alternatively, it can be viewed as a key function of management, the other functions being: Directing (Leading), Coordinating, Motivating, Planning, Recruiting and Procuring.
Third: One of the greatest challenges confronting trainers, facilitators and the institutions or organizations which they serve is the actual or perceived gap between the skills supplied and those actually demanded by diverse segments of national or global labour markets. There is, it is argued, a skills gap which hampers employers' capacity to optimize available opportunities. All the blame for this is directed toward universities, in particular, and other educational or training institutions. Potential employers despair and cry foul, faced with what they see as waves, year after year, of graduates armed only with theoretical knowledge and hollow paper qualifications. And yet institutional training on a mass scale cannot have degree or diploma programmes tailor-made for the very specific skill-needs of every employer (extant or still to come) in every sector of an economy. Employers demand a targeted approach to training, and demand it, as if they didn't know, of institutions hard-wired for the shotgun approach to skill-building (which delivers competence to a far greater degree than it can mould competency); institutions too timid to offer a robust corporate responses to such accusations -- which are largely sanctimonious and self-flattering. "So, what's one to do to make progress?" That's one of the tough questions we will have to wrestle with.
* * * *
There is a very strong TOT (Training of Trainers) element in this course. How does the TOT approach come in? This question is addressed at various points in the course, if often obliquely. But, very briefly, the answer to that question is as follows: The course will deliver K and, hopefully (directly and indirectly), an enhanced or reconfigured set A – which should lead to (translate into) enhanced P. The same process should cascade to the trainees you will subsequently train. We know we are training experts – even champions. But we also want to have a multiplier effect. This can best be achieved via a TOT format.
Question: Why the focus on advanced training techniques?
Answer: First of all, training is a key pillar of investment in human resource. Alternatively, it can be viewed as a key function of management, the other functions being: Directing (Leading), Coordinating, Motivating, Planning, Recruiting and Procuring.
A widely acknowledged and oft stated point in management and development circles -- stated to the point of turning an important notion into a cliche -- is that people are the most valuable resources [or ‘assets’] that an organization, community or society has. Indeed, it is this value to society which people represent that gave currency, in the Sixties, to the term Human Capital. This was later widely replaced by the term HR; and now HRM and HRD are among the most commonly used acronyms around.
If HR are so valuable, it follows that we must invest in them quite deliberately in order to maximize their potential. Certainly, we shouldn’t let HR go to waste or lie idle. We can invest in HR in a number of ways: We can improve on nutrition, or ensure first and foremost that there is enough of basic food requirements to go around. We can invest in health: child, public, occupational and the like. We can provide adequate or improved shelter. We can provide requisite security. We can recruit people into into specific 'jobs' or roles in our various organizations and enterprises. And we can allow or facilitate HR migration to elsewhere: from rural to urban or other rural areas; from one country to neighboring ones, or overseas. Above all, perhaps, we can educate and train people – and employ them.
It can generally be said that we train people in order to make them more productive, but the reality of training is more complicated than that. There is obviously societal need to operate more seamlessly, more predictably and more optimally. In a word, the need to make society operate as though it were a healthy, robust and clearly purposeful organism.
Thus, secondly, if we opt to educate and train, we are compelled to decide how best to do so; and to do so we must (a) explore how humans learn -- i.e. the nature of learning, or how Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (skills, competences and competencies) are learned and acquired; (b) interrogate the various ways in which training is (or should be) effectively conducted and the trainer’s/facilitator’s role is (or should be) construed or constructed; and, (c) discover ways in which humans can be made to learn or train more effectively. We are compelled, in other words, to examine the various training techniques to decide which ones are most appropriate in/to given situations -- for the learners and for the sponsoring entities.
It can generally be said that we train people in order to make them more productive, but the reality of training is more complicated than that. There is obviously societal need to operate more seamlessly, more predictably and more optimally. In a word, the need to make society operate as though it were a healthy, robust and clearly purposeful organism.
Thus, secondly, if we opt to educate and train, we are compelled to decide how best to do so; and to do so we must (a) explore how humans learn -- i.e. the nature of learning, or how Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices (skills, competences and competencies) are learned and acquired; (b) interrogate the various ways in which training is (or should be) effectively conducted and the trainer’s/facilitator’s role is (or should be) construed or constructed; and, (c) discover ways in which humans can be made to learn or train more effectively. We are compelled, in other words, to examine the various training techniques to decide which ones are most appropriate in/to given situations -- for the learners and for the sponsoring entities.
So discovering and implementing those ways is the broad purpose of this course. It is “Advanced” because we seek to go beyond mere descriptions of form (of categories and types of training techniques) in order to look in some detail at content (the ‘how tos’ of specific techniques) and method; and because we seek to look into the interplay between theory and method in a broad TOT context.
Third: One of the greatest challenges confronting trainers, facilitators and the institutions or organizations which they serve is the actual or perceived gap between the skills supplied and those actually demanded by diverse segments of national or global labour markets. There is, it is argued, a skills gap which hampers employers' capacity to optimize available opportunities. All the blame for this is directed toward universities, in particular, and other educational or training institutions. Potential employers despair and cry foul, faced with what they see as waves, year after year, of graduates armed only with theoretical knowledge and hollow paper qualifications. And yet institutional training on a mass scale cannot have degree or diploma programmes tailor-made for the very specific skill-needs of every employer (extant or still to come) in every sector of an economy. Employers demand a targeted approach to training, and demand it, as if they didn't know, of institutions hard-wired for the shotgun approach to skill-building (which delivers competence to a far greater degree than it can mould competency); institutions too timid to offer a robust corporate responses to such accusations -- which are largely sanctimonious and self-flattering. "So, what's one to do to make progress?" That's one of the tough questions we will have to wrestle with.
* * * *
We will, as we move along, encounter many training techniques (or methods) in this course – over 35 (thirty five)[1] in fact. However, there is frequently close interweaving among apparently dissimilar (or disparate) techniques or sets/clusters of them. Indeed, it has been argued that, in practice, training techniques have been “adapted and combined in an almost infinite variety of ways”; and “even the most widely used and well-known” techniques “show wide variation in use depending on factors [external to the techniques themselves] such as instructors and trainees involved and the task being learned” (Arnold, Robertson and Cooper, 1996: 254)[2].
Among these best-known techniques are: Lectures, Case Studies, Demonstration and Practice (Arnold, Robertson and Cooper, 1996: 254). Lectures, such as today’s. Case Studies, such as Harvard Business School is famous for. Demonstrations, as in Mke Nyumbani, but not as in the demonstrations that the students of the University of Nairobi “have been known” for. And Practice, as in the learning by doing that is characteristic of apprentice training, on the job training, delegation, assignment, extension workers demonstrations, teaching practice, doctors’ internship or lawyers’ pupilage, high school laboratory work, and so on.
Other well-known techniques not immediately related to the above are: Classroom Instruction, Coaching (though many observes do not take it as such, for example the football coach – who is only supposed to win matches), Use of Audio-Visual Methods, Games and Meetings of various kinds.
Among these best-known techniques are: Lectures, Case Studies, Demonstration and Practice (Arnold, Robertson and Cooper, 1996: 254). Lectures, such as today’s. Case Studies, such as Harvard Business School is famous for. Demonstrations, as in Mke Nyumbani, but not as in the demonstrations that the students of the University of Nairobi “have been known” for. And Practice, as in the learning by doing that is characteristic of apprentice training, on the job training, delegation, assignment, extension workers demonstrations, teaching practice, doctors’ internship or lawyers’ pupilage, high school laboratory work, and so on.
Other well-known techniques not immediately related to the above are: Classroom Instruction, Coaching (though many observes do not take it as such, for example the football coach – who is only supposed to win matches), Use of Audio-Visual Methods, Games and Meetings of various kinds.
There is a very strong TOT (Training of Trainers) element in this course. How does the TOT approach come in? This question is addressed at various points in the course, if often obliquely. But, very briefly, the answer to that question is as follows: The course will deliver K and, hopefully (directly and indirectly), an enhanced or reconfigured set A – which should lead to (translate into) enhanced P. The same process should cascade to the trainees you will subsequently train. We know we are training experts – even champions. But we also want to have a multiplier effect. This can best be achieved via a TOT format.
END OF ANSWER
[1] (1) Apprenticeship (2) Shadowing (3) On-the-job experience (other than apprenticeship) (4) Attachment/Placement (5) Induction/Orientation (6) Demonstration (7) Coaching (8) Mentoring (9) Job/Position Rotation or Secondment or Externship (10) Delegation (11) Job Enrichment/Enlargement (12) Project Guided/Selective Reading (13) Guided Experience (14) Programmed Instruction/ Learning (15) Computer-Based Training (CBT) or E-Learning (16) Computer-Managed Instruction (CMI) (17) Use of Audio-Visual Methods (18) Use of Interactive Video (19) Use of CCTV (20) Team Learning or T-group Training or Laboratory Training or Group Dynamics Training or Group Methods (21) Leadership/Management Training/Development (22) Lectures (23) Classroom Instruction (24) Seminars (25) Workshops (26) Conferences (27) Meetings (28) Panels (29) Case Studies or Case Method (30) Role Play (31) Games such as Management and Business Games (32) Simulation (33) Drills and Exercises (34) Behaviour Modelling Training (BMT) (35) Correspondence Study or Independent Study or Self-Directed Learning or Training By Objectives (36) Scenario Building or Vision-Building and (37) Sensitivity Training.
Human Behaviour in the Workplace. New Delhi: Macmillan India.
Wednesday, January 27, 2016
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