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Lego Rules, or, Break the Rules!
By Shlomo Maital
In 2005 Lego (the Danish company that makes plastic bricks) surprised the world with its hit video game Lego Star Wars. Since then, there have been 15 released, published by Warner Bros. The latest is The Lego Movie Videogame, based on the hit 3D The Lego Movie, #1 in North America! In the Lego video games, everything is made from Lego pieces.
But there is a catch. According to Stephen Totilo, writing in the Global New York Times (Feb. 13), “those pieces can be built into only one thing, whatever the game designer intended them to form.”
This is extreme irony. The whole beauty of Lego blocks, of which I am a lifetime fan, having played with them with our four children and today, with our dozen grandchildren, is that you can imagine, dream and make anything out of them. Why in the world did Lego dump this crucial aspect? It reminds me of the cartoon I pasted above my desk: “Teacher: ‘I insist that you kids all be creative and imaginative – and do exactly as I tell you.’ “.
There is an alternative. The Swedish 2011 virtual building-block game Minecraft lets you build absolutely anything you wish, anything you can dream. And it’s a huge success.
Lego vs. Minecraft. This, in miniature, is the dilemma of our schools. Teach kids the right way, the only way… or teach them to find their own way, other ways, imaginative ways.
We need Minecraft schools. But how in the world do you create them, when our educators seem unable even to imagine them. It seems the Lego bricks we use to build schools lack a few key pieces — the ones labelled “think different” and “let your imagination soar”.
Shirley Temple: From Good Ship Lollipop! To Diplomacy
By Shlomo Maital
Shirley Temple Black passed away on Feb. 10. She was 85. She became famous when she began a movie career when only 3 years old, and in 1935, when she was only 7, won a special Academy Award for her movies. As a child star, she once made 8 movies in a single year. During the Great Depression her movies brought joy and relief to millions. Shirley Temple’s signature song was The Good Ship Lollipop, which sold 500,000 sheet music copies.
Child movie stars often have troubled adolescence and adult lives. But Shirley Temple figured it out. She realized that her ringlets and precocious acting, singing and dancing would evaporate when she grew older. After an unhappy first marriage, she married Charles Black and became a diplomat, serving the United States in the United Nations and as Ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia.
When asked what her secret was, she said, with a smile: Start early.
The BBC recounts a great Shirley Temple story. She was once invited to The White House to meet President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. When the First Lady was bending over, Shirley (who was a tomboy) pulled a slingshot out of her pocket and fired a stone at the First Lady’s rear end. Eleanor Roosevelt stood up with a start. The Secret Service scoured the room… but no one suspected the curly-haired little angel.
Shirley Temple’s life shows us that most of us, perhaps all of us, will need to reinvent ourselves and our careers at least once, when our skills and capabilities are made irrelevant by the rapid pace of change. We can do as Shirley did, and simply move on, adapt, adjust and find something new, or we can wallow in bitterness and regret. Like Shirley Temple, each of us needs to think well in advance, what will I do next, when what I do now is no longer relevant? And it’s best to start now.
Build Your Dream: Helping London’s Pollution
By Shlomo Maital
Wang Chuanfu
Build Your Dream (BYD) is a Chinese electric-car company, which I’ve written about before. It was founded by a genius Chinese scientist Wang Chuanfu, who invented a revolutionary lithium ion battery, then decided to build cars around it.
BYD just announced (Financial Times, Feb. 10) that it will launch London’s first ever all-electric taxi fleet today (Tuesday). It thus beats London Mayor Boris Johnson’s deadline for all London’s taxis to be zero-emission by 2018.
BYD has thus won the race against Nissan, and London Taxi Company (LTC, which makes the iconic black London cabs). LTC is now owned by the Chinese carmaker Geely.
The BYD cabs can be ordered by smartphone apps (like Hailo and Uber); they have a range of 186 miles and will use a network of battery chargers installed by British Gas across London.
BYD currently runs fleets of all-electric taxis across China, in Colombia, Hong Kong, and soon in Singapore.
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns a 10 per cent stake in BYD. Earlier BYD supplied London’s first-ever fully-electric buses.
Mayor Johnson’s office says taxis create a third of all the exhaust emissions in London.
It’s Not How Much You Earn, It’s How You Spend it!
By Shlomo Maital
As an aging economist (Ph.D. 1967), I want to propose a vote of thanks to the psychologists. They have saved my discipline from total irrelevance.
We economists for years asked, how can people, and countries, earn more and grow wealthier? How can we make more money?
Alas, it turns out, I and my colleagues were asking the wrong question. We ruined our planet by striving for continual economic growth, and created massive inequality in wealth and income distribution that is destabilizing nations and the world, by preaching extreme free-market theory that contributed to the 2008 financial collapse. Good work, economists.
So, what is the right question?
How can we SPEND our money better, both as individuals, as families, and as nations? Not how can we make more of it.
And a strong answer comes from solid research by psychologists Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton (U.B.C., Simon Fraser, and Harvard, respectively). *
They begin by asking, if you dug into a jacket pocket stored since winter, and found $20, would you spend it on yourself, give to a homeless person, or buy your partner a bouquet of tulips? They ask this, because “how people spend their money may be at least as important (for their happiness) as the amount of money they have”.
In their experiment, they gave people on a university campus $5, or $20, and asked them to spend it by the end of day. Half of the participants were told to spend the money on themselves. Half were told to spend the money on somone else (prosocial spending).
That evening, “people who had been assigned to spend the money on someone else reported happier moods over the course of the day than did those people assigned to spend the money on themselves”. And the amount of money the participants received had no bearing on their perceived happiness.
Interestingly, the economists’ fallacy prevails in our perceptions. “When we described the experiment to other participants, …they believed that they would be happier spending more money ($20 rather than $5) and that they would be happier spending it on themselves.”
In other words: We believe that selfishness promotes our happiness, and we believe that more (money) is better than less, two of the axioms of economic theory.
And we are wrong.
So, thanks psychologists! At the end of the day, just before I fall asleep, I review my day and what I achieved. Invariably, a day when I did something good for someone – family, friends, strangers – is one that leaves me falling asleep smiling. And when I wake, I remind myself to do things that will create that feeling later that evening.
Give it a try!
* Dunn, Aknin and Norton. “Prosocial spending and happiness: using money to benefit others pays off”. Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 23, 1, pp. 41-47, 2014.
Survival: An Extreme Case
By Shlomo Maital
Jose Ivan Morales
The Guardian, BBC and other media report the strange story of Jose Ivan Morales, a Mexican fisherman, who with two companions went to sea in a small 24 ft. boat …and ended up 16 months later in the Marshall Islands, 8,000 miles away from Mexico.
The fishermen left Mexico in September 2012. Apparently there was a technical failure – the propellers fell off. The two companions ostensibly died during the journey.
How did Jose Ivan survive? According to The Guardian, “Ivan indicated … that he survived by eating turtles, birds and fish and drinking turtle blood when there was no rain. No fishing gear was on the boat and Ivan suggested he caught turtles and birds with his bare hands. There was a turtle on the boat when it landed at Ebon.”
One of my favorite programs on the Discovery channel is Bear Grylls’ program on survival. Grylls, who served for years in the British special forces, dives into icy Arctic water, tumbles down slopes, is buried in an avalanche, and in general shows us how to eat anything available, and build shelter, to continue to stay alive. The key principle? Never, ever give up. Never quit. People die of lack of hope, more than anything.
Jose Ivan has taught us that you can survive in impossible conditions, if you improvise, act, and continue to hope. I wish all those who lose hope and take their own lives could receive this message somehow.
The Daniel Arm: Act! Don’t Just Fret!
By Shlomo Maital
Daniel Omar (right) and his 3D Printed Prosthetic Arm
In our new book The Imagination Elevator, the first of 10 key principles for structured creativity is this: Act, Don’t Just Gripe. Take action to right a wrong, rather than just talk about it – at least some of the time.
Writing in The Guardian, Jan. 19, Emma Bryce recounts how Mike Ebeling, a Los Angeles resident and entrepreneur, did just this.
As the founder of an American startup called Not Impossible Labs, an organisation that builds open-access devices to assist people facing seemingly insurmountable physical challenges, Ebeling recounts how TIME magazine wrote about Daniel Omar, South Sudan, who in March 2012, at the age of 14, “embraced a tree trunk to shield himself from a bomb’s blow, and stepped away without his hands. Aware of the burden he would place on his family, in 2012 Omar told a Time reporter that he would rather have died when the government’s Antonov aircraft dropped its lethal cargo.” [This brings to mind the current Syrian Government’s policy of dropping oil drums filled with explosives on civilian buildings in Aleppo, killing thousands].
Seeing this declaration on paper shocked Mick Ebeling. Ebeling read this and thought, “I’ve got three little boys… It was hard for me to read a story about a young boy who had lost his arms.”
Here is what he did, according to Bryce. “In November 2013, Ebeling travelled to Sudan for a month, hoping to find Daniel and build him an arm. He took with him printers, spools of plastic and cables. The 3D printers that create the prosthetic’s plastic parts make the device seem hi-tech, but the resulting arm is really just a simple, mechanical device. The arm works by using movement to trigger cables, threaded throughout the plastic structure like ligaments. When the user flexes and bends the remaining portion of their arm, this motion tenses the cables, which in turn curl and uncurl the fingers at the tip.”
“Since Ebeling has returned home, one prosthetic a week has been printed, thanks to two 3D printers he left behind. The machines sit humming industriously – mostly at night when it’s cool enough for them to work. The printed parts are then collected by eight local people trained to operate the machines, assemble the arms, and customize them for recipients.”
Ebeling identified an unmet need, one he was passionate about; thought creatively about simple, inexpensive solutions (the prosthetic arm costs a total of $100, a fraction of conventional prosthetics), and took action, getting on a plane and going to the site.
If only more of us would do the same.
Can the “Social Interaction Hormone” Help Cure Autism?
By Shlomo Maital
Writing in the Scientific American blog “LiveScience”, Dec. 2, 2013, Bahar Gholipour shares an interesting new development in the treatment of autism.
[ Autism (properly known as autism spectrum disorder, ASD) is almost 5 times more common among boys (1 in 54) than among girls (1 in 252). Autism overall afflicts one child in about 150. But a study in South Korea revealed a higher incidence, 2.6 percent; and autism does seem to be on the rise. No one knows what causes it, nor why it is increasing. ]
Apparently, there is a hormone secreted by the body that controls social interaction, known as oxytocin.
According to Gohlipour, “although the hormone didn’t change children’s social skills in the study, its boosting effect on the brain’s social areas suggests that using oxytocin nasal sprays immediately before behavioral therapies could boost the effects of those treatments …. Oxytocin temporarily normalized brain regions responsible for the social deficits seen in children with autism, said study researcher Ilanit Gordon, a neuroscientist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn.
But when children received oxytocin they showed greater activity in the “social brain,” which includes regions that process social information and are linked to reward, social perception and emotional awareness.”
How exactly does oxytocin work? “It remains unclear how the hormone affects the brain and leads to better social processing. One possibility is that oxytocin makes social stimuli more rewarding to children with autism, the researchers said. It is also possible that the hormone makes the information pertaining to humans stand out from the background information consisting of objects and, in turn, helps social information to become salient to people with autism, the researchers said.”
Goodbye, Pete! Thanks for Everything!
By Shlomo Maital
The beloved American folksinger Pete Singer died on Jan. 27. He was 94.
Seeger sang, wrote songs, protested and performed for over 70 years. I remember hearing him in concert, in Ottawa, 50 years ago. He sang “The Bells of Rhymney”, accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar. That guitar, hard to play, sounded like an entire orchestra, and amazingly, like the Bells of Rhymney.
Seeger once belonged to the Communist Party. That won him a blacklist in the U.S., during the McCarthy era, and kept him off TV. But in the end that was a benefit. He toured college campuses widely, and became an icon.
He and Joan Baez made the song “We Shall Overcome” the anthem of the civil rights protest movement in the 1960’s. Amazing what a difference one word makes. The initial lyrics were, “we will overcome”. Seeger changed it to “we SHALL overcome”. Why? “Shall” is assertive, definitive, emphatic. We SHALL do it.
As a member of The Weavers, Seeger recorded “Good night, Irene”, which made it to the top of the charts in the 1950s.
Seeger wrote great songs, like “If I had a hammer”, “Where have all the flowers gone,” and my favorite, “Turn, turn, turn” – the song they played when I first met my future wife, at Princeton Hillel.
Bye, Pete. We’ll miss you. We’re glad you sang and performed to the end, and that you had only a brief illness. Basically, you died with your boots on, singing and performing, playing that wonderful banjo, sometimes the 12-string. You taught us that there are many ways to protest, and singing is one of the most powerful.
Wawrinka and Samuel Beckett: On Failure
By Shlomo Maital
Samuel Beckett Stan Wawrinka
There is a very interesting connnection between Swiss tennis star Stan Wawrinka, #3 in the world and winner of the Australian Open, and author and playwright Samuel Beckett, Irish-French, author of Waiting for Godot.
Wawrinka just won the Australian Open Grand Slam, unexpectedly defeating Rafael Nadal, to whom he had repeatedly (at least 12 times in Grand Slam events) lost in the past. His win was decisive, in four sets, and Wawrinka at times (according to the New York Times) bullied Nadal, something that Nadal usually does himself with fierce ground strokes and serves.
Wawrinka himself found it hard to believe; and it is rare that a number 8 ranked player wins over the Big Four (Murray, Federer, Djokovic, Nadal).
What is his secret? According to Greg Bishop (Global New York Times, Jan. 28), last March Wawrinka had the following words, written by Beckett, tattooed on his left forearm: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better!” (from his play Westward Ho!, 1983).
Before Sunday’s Australian Open final, the Big Four players had won 34 of the 35 major titles. That means, if you’re not one of the big four, you have a one in 35 chance to win, or less than three per cent. But, if you try to fail better (that means, try your absolute best, facing huge odds, battle with everything you have, leave it all on the court, and walk off with dignity and pride even if you lose), one day you will win. Or, you will “fail to fail”, as Bishop puts it nicely, which means you will succeed.
Wawrinka offers us a big lesson in life. And it was fun to see how he himself could hardly believe he had won.
Mary Barra at GM: First Sure Steps
“Don’t Confuse Progress with Winning”
By Shlomo Maital
I’m following new GM CEO Mary T. Barra closely, after she took over the company on Jan. 15 from Daniel Akerson. Akerson was appointed by the U.S. Government, which bailed out GM, and saved it from bankruptcy, then sold its GM shares at a profit. Akerson spent his four years as CEO “cajoling the company to shed its hidebound culture”, according to Bill Vlasic, New York Times (Jan. 25-26, p. 11). But Mary Barra has a different message. Speaking to top GM executives at a two-day meeting, her message struck just the right tone.
“There is no destination here, this is a continuous improvement journey. Don’t confuse progress with winning.”
Barra is a trained engineer and brings shop floor experience to the CEO job. And she ‘get’s it!’. The car business is all about building beautiful, sexy, powerful, appealing, attractive, safe, cost-effective fuel-efficient cars and trucks. It’s not a sport.
“Even when you’re leading in a segment, that’s only for the moment,” she cautions. “You have to continually keep raising the bar for yourself.”
That’s a powerful message for GM. It is doing well in the U.S. and China. U.S. sales rose 7.3 per cent last year, but the car industry itself overall grew by 7.6 per cent. GM has an 18 per cent market share in the U.S. and has struggled to maintain it. It lost the global lead to Toyota, which sold 10 m. vehicles last year, more than any other company.
Barra is far far less standoffish than her predecessors. She travels the world, holds small ‘town meetings’ with GM employees, and she is a good listener. She is also tough. “If you have a problem you better solve it. Because if you don’t, you won’t be here or the company won’t be here,” she says. She has set two ambitious goals for GM – 10 per cent net pre-tax profit margin in North America and breakeven in GM’s losing European operations, both by 2015.
My parents once bought a beautiful coral Oldsmobile with a white vinyl hardtop. It was a beautiful car that not only a mother could love. GM lost its way when it was led by a series of beancounters who cared nothing about cars. Can it reinvent itself, and its culture, under Barra? Could be. It’s fun to watch her in action. The future may indeed belong to women managers… see how Marissa Mayer has turned around Yahoo’s fortunes! And Janet Yellen, who will decide the fate of the dollar, and the U.S. economy.
TIMnovate 