Have they figured out Manchester United’s Ole Gunnar Solskjaer? In American football, most new coaches have flashes of brilliance. Give them 10 more games and the trajectory will evolve: the yo-yo coaches will fade while the legends will emerge. The fact is this: by the time game strategists watch 10-15 tapes, they can deconstruct any manager’s strategy on the pitch.
Manchester United lost to Arsenal in Premiership last week, and just added another loss to Wolves in the FA Cup. Sure, this should not cause any panic to ManU fans. And it must not diminish the transformation that Mr. Solskjaer had engineered since he replaced the chosen one – José Mourinho. Yet, the fans and the club owners should hope that the man has deep “strategy reserves”.
The Red Devils slumped to a 2-1 loss at Wolves on Saturday night and they could have no complaints about the result after a strangely subdued showing. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s reign as Manchester United manager suffered its first irreversible setback on Saturday as a sluggish performance saw them suffer an FA Cup exit at the hands of Wolves.
He needs those reserves to keep confusing and outsmarting opponents to win games. But if they have figured him out and he has no extra reserve to draw from, he is done. Modern soccer (yes, our football) is nothing but strategy executed by 11 men under the guidance of coaches. The quality of coaching is statistically significant to win championships irrespective of the quality of players.
Simply, Ole Gunnar Solskjaer needs a bigger strategy book, as Wole Soyinka will write in The Lion and the Jewel when Lakunle told Sidi: “ I have ordered / The Longer One [dictionary] – you wait”. The nation of Red Devils should send him a bigger book for his strategy!
In October 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that governments would have to take rapid, far reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society to avoid disastrous levels of global warming. The global scientific authority was unambiguous: at the current rate of warming, the planet will reach the crucial threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels as early as 2030.
The impacts which include stronger storms, more erratic weather, heat waves, floods, food shortages, rising sea levels, desertification, shrinking lakes and rivers, and large scale disruptions to migration patterns will be felt across ecosystems, communities and economies worldwide.
According to the IPCC, to ensure we maintain a 50-50 chance of limiting warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, CO2 emissions need to be lowered by 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
IKEA’s Innovation Lab Space 10 has unveiled a project ‘’SolarVille’’ which will redesign access to clean energy. Solarville is an ambitious and realizable vision for the future. It is a working prototype of a miniature neighborhood completely powered by solar energy. Built to a 1.50 scale, some households generate their own renewable energy using solar panels while others automatically purchase excess electricity directly from the producer using blockchain technology. The result is a model of a self-sufficient, community-driven microgrid system where people trade renewable and affordable energy from one another based on their individual needs.
As we went through the tour, one of the items got my brain firing. They have built this hand hair dryer that could buy the cheapest electricity using blockchain. In the dryer is a blockchain node via Internet connection which links it into an ecosystem. As you use the dryer, it would be combing the world, looking for the cheapest electricity. Once it finds, an AI bargains, and closes the deal. You would not even know. Yes, you would continue to dry your hair while the agents of bits and bytes do their jobs!
About 1.1 billion people around the world still have little or no access to electricity. It’s almost an expensive task to reach these people with centralized energy networks today as doing such is not economically optimized. Consequently, those locked in energy poverty continue to remain in that state.
Solarville aims to solve that problem through the combination of technologies such as solar energy, micro-grids and blockchain, opening new opportunities for off-grid systems, and allowing people to leapfrog traditional grid electricity infrastructures.
The Federal Ministry of Power, Works & Housing, Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, and Nigeria Bulk Electricity Trader should work out modalities which will make it convenient for embedded power providers to utilize the abundance of renewable energy in Nigeria to provide access to electricity for millions of Nigerians rather than the dependence on gas-powered Independent Power Plants which remain expensive and vulnerable to disruptions in gas production from the Niger Delta. The model of SolarVille may even work better in Nigeria since we have the abundance of solar energy in the nation.
I say this to many young people: the best time to get a job is when there is no advertised job. And to aspiring consulting entrepreneurs: the best time to get a contract is when there is no available contract. In this digital age, it should not be hard for people to know what you can do well.
Unless your works are working for you when you are sleeping, you cannot scale any mission. One great article can unlock huge opportunities for you, beyond whatever you can imagine. Yes, a computer code in a code repository will do more than a shiny resume which has been reviewed by HR experts. But will you take time to do those?
I shared an experience here of an encounter with two brilliant boys in Lagos. After writing about them, I am sure more than 30 people must have offered them jobs, including myself. They have no college degrees. What did we see? Their codes (yes, outputs) and not any paper or CV.
Quickly, I marshaled to track both in Nigeria and within minutes, I spoke with Moses. I offered jobs to start on Monday but Moses “smiled”. I offered to fund your ideas immediately, Moses “smiled”. Because that happened, your story becomes more exciting: jobs and money serve great people! You both are amazing.
Think about this stage in an interview.
Hiring Manager: You will be working on statistical modeling. We have data we need to understand better. We are looking for people with basic understanding of regression, series and calculus. While researching you, we saw this article you wrote on regression. Can you tell me more about this section? We decided to invite you because of this article.
Applicant: Sir, may I have a chalk since I can see a blackboard here. I can explain that paper. That was my college final year research work; I simply summarized it in the blog. In short, during my NYSC, I have updated the model with more insights I picked up from Coursera. So, the statistical model is now better. I will send a link to an updated article later. But I will begin with the paper you have and then extend to the state of the art at the moment.
Simply, if you are a developer, the best resume now is your GitHub account. Period! I challenge our young people to understand the new nature of work.
Next week, I will host a business webinar and Questions/Answers. Everyone is invited. It will be a great one; plan to attend. My desire is that you take action because nothing happens until you take action. The program is largely free – so you have no reason not to attend. Also, we have it on Friday and Saturday to ensure you have choices as you plan your week. Click below and register.
Dates: Friday March 22 2019 (repeat, Saturday March 23, 2019)
Venue: Online.
Time: 10am – 12noon (Webinar); 2.00pm-4.00pm (Questions/Answers). All time Lagos (Nigeria) time
Speaker: Prof Ndubuisi Ekekwe, Chairman, Fasmicro Group
Webinar Theme: Winning in Nigeria (and Africa)
Register: There are two ways to register (you need to pay to value my time); please email tekedia@fasmicro.com after payment to set up your account.
