Tirole's Nobel Lecture

Jean Tirole's 2014 Nobel Economics Prize lecture is masterful: clear; concise; simple, but not simplistic. He starts at 3:45:

Komla Dumor (1972-2014): Telling the African Story

The Wal-Mart Way

Reading The Wal-Mart Way: The Inside Story of the Success of the World's Largest Company by Don Soderquist:

The Best

There's a popular saying in the Bemba language: "Inshimbi ni nshimbi".

It defies adequate translation into English -- it literally means "metal is metal".

Its intended meaning, though, is that, sometimes, one must simply acknowledge the undeniable facts. Metal is metal, and nothing else.

It's painful to say this as an Arsenal fan, but not as an all-round football fan: it is an undeniable fact that Sir Alex Ferguson, who today stepped down as Manager of Manchester United, is quite simply the best football manager who has ever lived. His record at Manchester United alone speaks for itself: one Club World Cup title; two European Champions League titles; thirteen English Premier League titles; five English FA Cup titles. Not to mention many other less well known trophies. Indeed, Sir Alex Ferguson's greatness transcends even football itself. Judged on the basis of delivery of consistent results over time using finite resources, Sir Alex Ferguson is undoubtedly one of the greatest managers, of any kind, who has ever lived. Inshimbi ni nshimbi, Metal is metal.

Greatness in Leadership

From the May 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review:

HBR: As someone who’s known Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, what do you think makes a leader great?

Maya Angelou: A leader sees greatness in other people. You can’t be much of a leader if all you see is yourself.

Mere Anarchy: The Life and Work of Chinua Achebe

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

     -- W. B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Chinua Achebe died this week. He was 82. At 28, he loosed "Things Fall Apart" upon a completely unsuspecting and unprepared world. It was a cataclysmic event, but only his first and most famous act of mere anarchy. Achebe had a habit of doing that: totally changing the world's thinking with gracious nonchalance. He did it again in the 1970s with his critique of Western conceptions of Africa and Africans, of which Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" just happened to be the unfortunate literary example. No one has ever read "Heart of Darkness" in quite the same way since. A deeply principled and thoughtful man, Achebe has left an indelible mark on world literature. Several commentators have invoked a fitting West African proverb: A great tree has fallen. Indeed: a great tree has fallen, but it will continue to nourish the earth with its substance.

(The?) Engineering Prize

It's ironic that there is no universally recognised prize, equivalent to the Nobel Prize in science, for breakthroughs in engineering. Ironic because, of course, Alfred Nobel was an engineer himself. Perhaps the newly inaugurated Queen Elizabeth Prize will remedy this situation. 

Mama Africa

On what would have been her 81st birthday, the late great Miriam Makeba was honoured with her own Google doodle:
 

Noblest Nobel

My favourite Nobel prize this year was in the category of economics. It was awarded, in part, for empirical work on market design by Alvin E. Roth, an engineer turned economist (fittingly enough).

Be the best in the world at SOMETHING

[We] must head out to do our jobs so well that nobody could do them better. No matter what this job is, you must decide to do it well. Do it so well that the living, the dead, or the unborn can’t do it better. If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures; sweep streets like Michelangelo carved marble; sweep streets like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: “Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well.”

If you can’t be a pine on the top of the hill,
Be a shrub in the valley—but be
The best shrub on the side of the hill.

- "Some Things We Must Do", Martin Luther King, Jr.

Nobel Pursuits

The 2012 Nobel Prize Winners

The Corner Office

Corner Office is a weekly feature in The New York Times in which a different chief executive is interviewed each week by Adam Bryant; he started the feature in March 2009. It's a fascinating set of interviews and interviewees from all sectors of life.

Transcendent

That's the only way I can describe this:

Physics and Finance

Never the twain shall meet? Perhaps not.

"I am thinking now"

2012 is the 10th anniversary of the founding of Ashesi University College by Patrick Awuah. In his 2007 TED talk, Dr. Awuah describes the intense satisfaction he felt when an Ashesi student wrote him a simple note stating, "I am thinking now":

Happy Endings

This past weekend I took my son, the aspiring filmmaker, to see Martin Scorcese's Hugo. He loved it. And so did I. It's a wonderful (literally wonder-full), tender and lovingly made story. And an homage to early filmmakers and filmmaking. Scorcese's best in my opinion. It's certainly a radical departure from his normal work which, as we all know, never gets rated PG (like Hugo). The entire cast is superb. (Well, almost the entire cast. Sorry Sacha.) The performances of Sir Ben Kingsley, Asa Butterfield and Michael Stuhlbarg are especially good, excellent even. At one point, Georges Méliès, Ben Kingsley's character, expresses his deep disaffection with the way his life has turned out: "My life has taught me one lesson: Happy endings only happen in the movies." Without giving away too much, the whole story is about how Monsieur Méliès is cured of this cynical view of life through the efforts of the eponymous Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) and Prof. Rene Tabard (Michael Stuhlbarg).

I remembered this later on in the weekend when I watched a second happy ending: