Lessons from Mary Barra on leadership
Mary Barra is GM current CEO. She was appointed in January 2014 and she is the first female CEO of a major auto manufacturer. At the time of her appointment, she had been with GM for 33 years, making her a veteran of the company. Barra started working on the assembly line, inspecting fender and hood panels, to help pay her college fees as an 18 years old. She completed her degree in electrical engineering at the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) and then started worked as an engineer ...
Posted on November 24th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of November 19th
Music I'm listening
Jeff Goldblum & The Mildred Snitzer Orchestra - Cantaloupe Island (Live). I like when actors are also musicians. They usually bring an extroverted side that musicians don't really have. It's the case with Jeff Goldblum (Jurassic Park, Independence Day, Thor) who brings a lot of energy to the scene and approach it that way: "I love improvising and that feeling of communication and interplay. It's one of the cornerstones of my acting technique. I see my music in th...
Posted on November 24th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of November 5th
Music I'm listening
Khruangbin @ Villain. It's so smooth and sensual. I feel like I'm in an old western or in a Tarantino movie. Khruangbin is a Texan trio. Their sound is rooted in classic soul & Rnb, but they also include some funk, psychedelia, rock and pop. The projections at the live show are also worth looking at.
Podcast I listened
Seth Godin was on Tim Ferriss podcast and he dropped some gems. Feeling overwhelm is a systems problem: "Drinking from a fire hose is a really bad wa...
Posted on November 12th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of October 29th
Music I'm listening
Brothers from Harvey Sutherland. It is electronic music rooted in soul, disco and funk. Harvey was influenced by dance music, but not comfortable inside its rules and decided to create a world of his own: "looking for songs in strange places".
Podcast I listened
I got laser surgery this week, so I went on a podcast binge. My favorite was James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, on the Rich Roll podcast. Also very podcast notes here."Every action you take, is a vote for the type o...
Posted on November 5th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of September 24th and October 1st
What I'm listening
I was already a big fan of Jon Batiste and particularly of his Jazz is Now album. He released a new album, Hollywood Africans, which includes well known jazz songs like What A Wonderful World, Saint James Infirmary and The Very Thought of You.
What I'm reading
I read At Home with the Inner Self by Jim Burns. It's a short book of 126 pages that discusses how Jim Burns, a diagnosed schizophrenic tortured by his outer self for much of his life, studied his mind to become...
Posted on October 8th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of September 17th
What I'm listening
I don't know why but this week I had Hiatus Kaiyote - Nakamarra on my mind all the time. No love story, but I guess I just love the mix of soul, sensuality and energy in this song.
What I'm reading
I really liked this conversation between Michele Gelfand and Tyler Cowen. You can listen to the podcast, but it's also worth a read. Michele discusses the concept of tight and loose culture which is fascinating from a culture, social psychology and human behavior persp...
Posted on September 23rd, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of September 10th
Event I attended
On Saturday September 15th, I attended Ottawa Hockey Analytics at Carleton (#OTTHAC18). I'm less involved in hockey than I was in my younger years so I'm not very familiar will all the techniques used in sports analytics but the event was of high quality and quite interesting. Since the big missing piece in hockey analytics right now is player tracking, the most fascinating talk was from ccweaver1 who used deep convolutional neural networks and other ML techniques to extract ...
Posted on September 16th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of September 3rd
What I'm listening
One of my favorite live music show was Chambers from Chilly Gonzales and the Kaiser Quartett. I love Chilly's style and I think he's a musical genius. He just released Solo Piano III and it's beautiful. More description is needed. Like Haydon Spenceley said in his Under The Radar article: "When music is beautiful, it just is."
What I'm reading
I'm almost done with Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. I liked how they ref...
Posted on September 8th, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of August 27th
What I'm listening
One of my favorite product feature ever is Discover Weekly in Spotify. I listen to pretty much everything from classical music to hip hop, house, rock, funk, disco, jazz, etc. so it is amazing to me that they are (almost) always spot on on their recommendations. This week, one of the song they recommended is Jungle by Jimi Hendrix. The transitions are insane.
What I'm reading
I bought Alexander J.A Cortes Mega Program Package. When I was younger (lol), I played a lot of hockey (ie >...
Posted on August 31st, 2018
Roundabout Highlights - Week of August 20th
What I'm listening
After having tried a bunch of workout soundtrack, my two favorites are Hype and Pumping Iron. I used to listen to podcast while I was training, but I feel way more effective with high BPM soundtrack.
Random things I learned
1. According to a Certify report, "Uber and Lyft are dominating traditional business traveler ground transportation services. In Q1 2018, ride-hailing companies took 70.5% of all ground transportation receipts and expenses, while rental cars took 23.5% and taxis ...
Posted on August 28th, 2018