Alex Soojung-Kim Pang is the founder of The Restful Company and a visiting scholar at Stanford. He spent more than a decade as a science and technology forecaster, most recently as a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights. Alex received a Ph.D. in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania.
Five Good Questions:
1. What’s Wallas’s four-stage model of creativity?
2.What’s the Default Mode Network?
3. Our society idolizes the 80-100 hour work week as a requirement for success. How do you explain the paradox of the most productive and creative people working much less than that? Also, what is this notion of “deep play” that a lot of creative people practice?
4. What was a Bill Gates’s “Think Week” and what can we learn from it?
5. How has your daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly schedule changed based on what you learned writing a book about rest? How has it impacted how you think about work and creativity?
Marko Dimitrijevic is the founder and chairman of Volta Global, a private investment group in venture capital, private equity, real estate, and public markets. Marko Dimitrijevic has more than 35 years investing experience and has founded and managed two investment management companies with over $3 billion in assets. He is the author of Frontier Investor: How to Prosper in the Next Emerging Markets. Marko is a pioneer in conducting on-the-ground due diligence, particularly in frontier markets.
1. Can you give us a feel for how bad the home country bias is, and why it exists?
2. Let’s talk about some execution details. Aside from a passport, how do you research frontier markets? Would an individual’s best bet be country specific ETFs? What are your thoughts about hedging currency risk?
3. Which investment style pairs best with frontier market investing? Deep value, GARP, activist something else?
4. What’s the story of the evolution of Singapore and how does it illustrate the success of frontier market investing? Where’s the next Singapore?
5. Economic progress has typically followed the pattern of farming to manufacturing to service / knowledge economy. Is it possible that the disruption of robots and AI which are already displacing human labor will make it impossible for frontier countries to gain a foothold on the ladder?
Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and Scientist in Residence at Lux Capital. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado and a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation. In addition to Overcomplicated, he is the author of The Half-Life of Facts.
Five Good Questions:
Martin Ford is a futurist and the founder of a Silicon Valley-based software development firm. He has over 25 years experience in the fields of computer design and software development. He holds a computer engineering degree from the University of Michigan and a graduate business degree from the University of California, Los Angeles. Martin is an expert on the subject of accelerating progress in robotics and artificial intelligence—and what these advances mean for the economy, job market and society of the future.