Here are photos from a new session I developed and delivered recently at Amazon; attended by about 200 people (online, given the pandemic).
The session is still under construction actually; feels perhaps only 5-20% complete. I’ll be continuing to build this.
Median feedback rating: 4.8 stars out of 5.0. Most loved it, except one person who gave 1.5 stars without saying anything more.
Truly loved your talk, it was one of the best technical talk I have recently attended. It has lot of depth, different perspective, mental model. Truly awesome talk. […]
… Went brilliant overall. Thanks for taking this up. Really helpful
The talk had references to a lot of interesting concepts. The talk has motivated me to read more about these topics. Though I couldn’t directly relate these to my day to day decision making.
Was searching for a mentor like him.
The story of this goes back to December last year. A colleague had asked me to present some topic of value to the leaders (Director, Sr. Manager, …), something that’s uniquely “Alok”.
I was blank for a few days, before a picture emerged in my head. Over the time, working through various companies, I have sensed some anti-patterns, pitfalls, confusions recur in decision making which they were not seeing through. So I decided to make a session on something as basic as decision making, yet intended for an already mature, experienced audience! Once clear on the topic, I could type 5-6 pages starting in the domestic flight for the same trip, not unlike I type long messages here and there.
Attended at that time by about 30 people, the session was called ‘mind-opening’. One person said that it touched everything in life. They asked me to scale for a larger audience, which is now this session mentioned here.
The session is math-oriented, geared towards the long-term. It is not useful for any short-term decisions.
The core value addition from me in this session is to link to the mathematics of machine learning. The things that happen in machine learning algorithms are happening real life too, vice versa. E.g., I have asserted that a discussion going around in circles has a meaningful/deep connection to mathematics where a point in a very high-dimensional space would actually be going around in circles, like a planet around the sun.
I am hoping to get approval from Amazon to open this session too to outside Amazon.
Cover Photo: Pixabay
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