Just Thoughts #21: Politics and Sports

Covering content randomly consumed in long format in the free section, with payed having some highlights from a week at the lake house.

The content in this article is “handwritten” and only co-piloted with Grammarly’s spell-checking and re-phrasing for the desired tone of voice. I’m dyslectic, so using it removes my cognitive impediments.

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Reading these thoughts, you are either inspired or not. The first rule of reading these thoughts is asking yourself: Why should I think this way?

The highlight of the week: Spending Time at The Lake House.

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Last week, I spent one hour every morning seeking content that caught my attention, using LinkedIn, Substack, and the national newspaper Helsingin Sanomat. The goal was to source content so I could construct a seamless narrative for this edition of Just Thoughts. There is no given domain or subject, just the following curiosity. The outcome is a flipped script: the free section includes content under the paid section, and this week's paid section contains content previously featured in the free section.

Enjoy the read! Let me know what you think!

Firstly, I feel sorry for U.S. citizens. The presidential election has characters that better suit a post-apocalyptic video game rather than a real-world scenario. It also makes you think that the real power lies somewhere else, and you’d hope even the most conservative patriots would be ready to back an Afro-Indian-American woman. Namely, have Kamala Harris run for office. In the eyes of the rest of the world, this would be the most progressive choice you could make. However, I’m speaking from where we just elected a president in a way that some would label the most impeccable demonstration of democracy. Nonetheless, I’m waiting for the day one tech billionaire decides to run for office, as it seems a more likely scenario based on how things are developing in the states. If chosen based on who could do the best surfing, Zuck would be my bet.

Talking about the tech billionaires, the most educational content lately was Robert Miller’s take on AI safety, depicting how the different players are approaching AI development and pointing out that as long as the players are competing, as opposed to collaborating, the pace will only pick-up, and not develop at speeds where we could avoid a catastrophic event caused by a system miss-use.

This sketch is hilarious and a highly accurate take on the state of AI dominance. It bridges AI safety topics and covers some of the critical questions we should ask ourselves about AI development issues. My key takeaway was that Open Source LLM models aren’t actually “Open Source” because you cannot deduct how the system works based on reading the source code. Miller argues that the open-source principle doesn’t apply to systems with network weights. Shout out to

Conrad Gray

for featuring this content.

Whether it’s U.S. politics or the AI arms race, one would hope people could learn how to sit through difficult discussions constructively to be able to understand opposing views without belittling the person presenting them, and as much as I love Simon Sineks work, we’re past the point of “talking through this”. Some more decisive action is required.

However, when decisive action looks like striking down the Chevron Deference, you wonder if the country is actually “Striving for better,” as Simon puts it. The Chevron Deference was a law mandating that in cases under interpretation, it would be directed to the governing agencies (a.k.a. experts and scientists) to decide how the law should be interpreted instead of the judges in each case. Here’s Lipman, a top voice on LinkedIn but a non-expert, explaining the consequences of this, and that caught my attention to further reading on the matter here. The question is where the power lies, with the judges or agencies. The judges have no accountability towards the people and are not publically elected. You could easily argue the course of action puts the power with those who are more easily corruptable; in contrast, critical thinking would make me want to see a piece arguing for this being the better solution because the agencies have proven to be worse at wielding the power given to them. Nonetheless, the winner here is the 9 Billion dollar lobbying industry with 100,000 lobbyists, whereas the deciding judges in all these potential future corporate court cases amount to something short of 900.

Regardless of these bleak developments in the U.S., the world is not all bad, and a dose of hope I found this week was Sungai Design, a project to create recycled furniture out of Bali river waste.

The project is many years old, but apparently, it’s still operational, and you can buy furniture here.

On a completely different subject, but touching on the definition of Patriotism described by Simon above, my country hasn’t seen many positive developments in the past week. Finland dropped in global competitiveness rankings, and our newly elected President signed new legislation, making it harder for foreigners to acquire citizenship again. However, given the nationalistic party “the basic finns” with significant representation in the parliament, it could’ve been even worse. I’m not one to dwell much on political matters, and as a subject, I don’t enjoy discussing it. However, if there is any action that should be taken, and if it’s not as radical as getting the world’s top influencers on the subject to support your cause, like the local environmentalist getting Greta Thurnberg to protest with them, it would be to form a new political party. I’d call it “The International Finns,” and it would drive issues that directly oppose whatever “the basic finns” are for. Their political positioning is so short-sighted that I had to edit my analogy because it was politically incorrect. The goal would not be to polarize but to provide something new and different that could shake the linear thinking driving our politics. One must remember that Finland's entire political range, especially in national security issues and foreign policies, is a fraction of the world's political spectrum. For example, on the issue of joining NATO, the action was swift and decisive, and during the presidential elections, everyone refrained intentionally from commenting on the threat in the East. Hence, strict opposition to the basic finns would mainly be about strict opposition to internal affairs and policies.

In terms of what actually could work as a solution to the economic hell hole our country is digging for itself, I’d turn to yet again Timo Ahopelto, whom I’ve featured multiple times (the latest in Just Thoughts #20) and finally got covered by the national newspaper in the sort of light you’d want to see him portrayed in. I'm calling for 100 new companies sized at 100M-500M and the accompanying legislation and government strategy to enable it. Additionally, we shouldn’t wait for another Nokia and learn from past mistakes, as this other recent piece in the national newspaper describes the fall of Nokia due to the lack of emotional regulation and how emotions drove decision-making. The notion is about as insightful as the doctoral dissertation by one of my former professors, Peter Kenttä, who concluded (put simplistically) that a workplace strives when employees are treated as adults at the workplace, as opposed to child-parent-like relationships or any other combination of relationships that are not adult-to-adult. These sorts of notions are only revelations to the biased conservative “old-school” white male leadership. This is not to say women or racial minorities are inherently better leaders due to their heritage. It’s mainly referring to a Western stereotype, as you’ll rarely see an incompetent racial minority leader ever making the history books in Western society, as the ratio of great leaders belonging to minorities or women is outnumbered at 10:1, if not worse, ratios.

To conclude, this rant about the country's future needs is a new breed of leadership capability that can build, scale, and lead the type of multinational companies Timo discusses. We need leaders who understand you need to account for the diversifying needs of the workforce and the asymmetry of knowledge work caused by automation (working more doesn’t necessarily yield better results). In addition, product-market fit is no longer enough, especially for software products. It would be best if you had position market fit, as highlighted by

Aakash Gupta

.

Furthermore, we need leaders who understand the difference between leadership and management. Individuals who realize that mitigating bias requires the desire to work through their own beliefs and inherited worldviews about the world because there are no truths about right and wrong in every moral dilemma.

Hence, I’ve decided to focus on my skills, ability, and interest in developing individual leadership capabilities. Pursuing opportunities in more prominent companies as a) I don’t have traction in my business coaching, b) smaller companies don’t have internal roles entailing the responsibilities of leadership development. To elaborate on a) One could do this directly as an entrepreneur in business coaching or as part of venture capitalist portfolios. However, I haven’t generated enough inspiration to feel people want to ask for it. I believe you cannot coach if you don’t first inspire. Additionally, VCs aren’t hiring in the current market conditions.

Finally, if you’re looking for inspiration regarding talent development, someone should look closely at what has happened with Finnish basketball. Finland just played the Olympic qualifiers, going head-to-head with Spain, one of the best basketball countries in the world. They only lost by a margin during the last minutes. When I started playing over twenty years ago, Finland was a b-league country, with international talent amounting to only a few players. Today, we have one of the best players in the world, Lauri Markkanen, and even without him, the national team can compete with the best of nations. This is inherent to the culture born by now retired head coach of the men’s national team, Henrik Dettman. As depicted in the book describing his legacy, the art of leadership, he’s bread a culture that has not only made the wolves (as the national team is called) a formidable adversary on the court, Dettman created a culture that breads more leaders and a hunger for excellence without him even being present.

Maybe, just maybe, there is something to be learned from Finnish basketball, which has produced a new generation of 100+ players who can compete on the top levels of international basketball when building the following 100 multimillion companies hailing from Finland.

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Flipping the script with a more extended section on free than in the paid section during this holiday season, I’m mainly sharing what others would put on their social profiles for free in this week’s Just Thoughts.

Headlines this week:

1. Pyttis: The profitable municipality.

2. Book Review: Discipline is Destiny

3. Poem of the Week: Angel

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