Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking Business Strategy

Cheery Friday Greetings from Barb Oakley!

Headed to Cambridge

In a couple of weeks I’ll be giving the opening keynote and a workshop at the Cambridge Schools Conference in Cambridge, UK (July 15–16). If you’ll be there, come find me!

Stranded in the Rain in Taiwan’s Silicon Valley — the Lesson Behind Teresa Martín-Retortillo’s New Book on Business Strategy 

A few months ago I spent an evening stuck in a car in Hsinchu—Taiwan’s Silicon Valley—inching forward for hours in a downpour. Why the traffic jam? Hsinchu was modeled on the original Silicon Valley, right down to copying its weak spot: no solid public transportation of the kind you find all over Europe. Both Silicon Valley and Hsinchu grew up fast on the chip business. But in the rush, nobody thought hard, early on, about how people would actually get around once things took off. So there I sat — in one of the most advanced places on earth, dead in the water.

But there’s a bigger lesson in that traffic jam. Early on, there’s a short window when you can lay down sensible bones for a future you can’t fully see yet. Miss the window, and you spend years—sometimes decades—wrestling with a mucked-up system that makes life harder for everyone.

That’s exactly what my good friend Teresa Martín-Retortillo takes on in her fine new book, Artificial Intelligence: Rethinking Business Strategy. She spent some twenty years as a partner at Bain & Company, advising CEOs and their boards through more than a hundred deals—the messy, high-stakes transformations a company either gets right or pays for later. She’d started out as a young analyst at Goldman Sachs in London. Then she moved into education, helping a global publisher reinvent itself for the digital age, and today she runs executive education at IE Business School in Madrid. So Teresa isn’t theorizing about how a business steers through hard change. She’s done it, at the top, for thirty years. Her book walks leaders through the known-knowns, the known-unknowns, and a handful of plausible future scenarios worth working through now—not after the traffic’s already backed up.

When “No Complaints” Counts as a Rave Review

A late-career math teacher once asked his head of school for feedback. The reply: “You must be doing a great job, since I haven’t heard any parent complaints.” That’s the whole problem in one sentence. The teacher, (an immigrant who wrote the memoir we’ve mentioned before, Unbalanced, about teaching high school math after COVID), argues that somewhere around 2015 American schooling swapped accountability for equity as its goal—and the numbers since haven’t been pretty. Twelfth-grade NAEP math slipped. The gap between the top and bottom students didn’t shrink—it grew. And per-student spending climbed 52% along the way. More money, worse math. The mechanisms he describes—grade floors, unlimited retakes, dollars counted instead of outcomes—will be familiar to anyone who’s watched a yardstick disappear. His hopeful counterexample is the one to remember: the Mississippi Miracle, where grade retention plus better reading instruction lifted the state from 49th to 9th in 4th-grade reading. Check this post out!

You Wouldn’t Sing a Song Just Once

I recently joined Krutiya Adatiya on On Your Marks, a podcast from ACCA—the global body for chartered accountants—for people studying for their professional exams. She told me that as a kid she always felt like the slow one—her brothers studied half as long and got the same grades. I had exactly the same experience. And it turns out slow learners often have the advantage: because they can’t skate over the hard parts, they catch what the fast learners miss. Hayek said he owed much of his Nobel-winning work to being slower than his clever friends.

Then we got to math, which trips up a lot of accountancy students. You wouldn’t sing a song through one time and call yourself a singer—and a math problem works the same way. You practice it until each step whispers the next, until you can look at the page and think, “Oh, I know this one.” Does it take time? Sure. So does learning to sing well.

Have a listen if you’ve ever studied hard for an exam, then watched it all vanish the moment you sat down. 

Lauren Brown on researchEd NYC—and “cognitive redlining”

I’m a stalwart supporter of researchEd, having just finished keynotes at the Tokyo and Bogota conferences. (Every researchEd speaker donates their time—that’s how the movement runs.) researchEd’s founder, Tom Bennett, is the longtime London teacher whose 2013 tweet grew into the whole thing. He’s also serious about classroom management. (His book Running the Room: The Teacher’s Guide to Behaviour is literally “best in class.”) At a researchEd in Santiago, I used Tom’s techniques to bring a group of recalcitrant students to initially begrudging—and then rapt—attention. researchEd’s mission is to make teachers research-literate and pseudo-science-proof, and protect classrooms from the steady stream of “proven-by-research” initiatives that turn out to be nothing of the kind. From one tweet to six continents and 25 countries.

Lauren Brown’s post on the recent researchEd NYC is the next best thing to being there. The standout: Zaretta Hammond’s morning keynote, where she linked the science of learning to racial equity and gave us a new term—cognitive redlining—for the way bad teaching further disenfranchises the already-disenfranchised. Antiracism alone, Hammond said, isn’t enough to disrupt it. The remedy is to actually teach—to get kids thinking and build their knowledge. Or take Lynn Gaffney’s line at the final panel: “I feel like I’ve been lied to”—about her training never once mentioning the science of learning. A lie by omission, Lauren calls it. Check it out! Takeaways from researchED NYC

That’s all for now. Happy learning!

Barb Oakley

• Uncommon Sense Teaching—the book and Coursera Specialization!
• Mindshift—the book and MOOC
• Learn Like a Pro—the book and MOOC
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• For kids and parents: Learning How to Learn—the book and MOOC. Pro tip—watch the videos and read the book together with your child. Learning how to learn at an early age will change their life!