Curious Random Thoughts

http://denverdatascienceday.com/ This was an extremely informative conference on Data Science. All the speakers were excellent and the sessions were extremely informative and thought provoking. Alex Sandovsky, Senior Director of Data Science at Oracle was the first keynote who talked about how computers are deciding what you will buy at the grocery store; how companies are marketing in the age of data science. Some highlights of the talk: What people buy Who they are Where they go What they do They have 115 million buyer households with identity matched data including retail, tv viewership, consumer goods & auto. bluekai - cookie based data marketplace add this - java scripts powered tools Where data comes from? postal address cookies email addresses ip addresses phone DeviceID web browser gaming consoles logins Strong ID Graph is used for Marketing pandas - programming language Oracle Data Cloud technologies: Terraform cloud, Hadoop file syst...

http://www.thestartupofyou.com/ The Startup of You is a huge eye opener on how little things can transform your life and career. The authors describe in detail on how everyone should have a Plan A, B and Z as many a black swan events have taught us nothing in life is permanent. They talk about the importance of a great professional network and provide great examples like how the initial co-founders and managers at Paypal went on to create a variety of new companies (including Tesla, SpaceX, Kiva, Yelp, Yammer, YouTube, Square and Linkedin) utilizing their past connections. Besides providing numerous real world examples and research, the authors also provide great exercises at the end of every chapter that is easy to follow and implement. Contrary to my initial expectations, this is definitely not your run of the mill self development book. Its one of the best I have read in this category so far.

https://www.workrules.net/ Work Rules gives an excellent behind the scenes view of how Google became America's most desirable company to work for. Laszlo Bock, SVP of People Operations at Google, gives an extensive in-depth description and analysis of the philosophy behind Google's work culture, hiring process, performance management, compensation and benefits. Laszlo Bock reveals the many failures of policies that were implemented at some point in time and how they learnt from their mistakes. All along, Lazlo Bock gives excellent tips on how each of us in management positions at different companies can change and impact the direction of our respective organizations. A surprising revelation was how their initial quest to hire the best candidate out there ended in lackluster success. While Google's benefits are purportedly legendary, contrary to popular opinion, not every benefit at Google costs the company money. This book is definitely a must read for all managers in an...