The purpose of this update is to share my learnings and unlearnings, with the expectation that some will be of value to you.

Personal Update:

• Began the mentoring process for startups at the University of Toronto Department of Engineering. Earlier this year, interviewed candidates.  The weekly advisory board meetings with a startup will begin in May.
• Continued as Board Director at Computer Aid Canada.
• Continued as a Patient Family Advisor at the Odette Cancer Centre – Sunnybrook Hospital.
• Continued my long-term fundraising for the Geoff Carr Fellowship at Lupus Ontario. Over the past 18 years family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues have contributed almost $270,000.
• Continued to share with you, and on my website, some of what I’ve learned and unlearned, with the intent that some of you will find value. The learnings and unlearnings are applicable to any size company, ranging from early-stage startups to large global enterprises.
• I joined the Angel Capital Association in the US.
• These past 6 months I did not conduct a mentoring program for 1^st year MBA students at the Rotman Business. (The first time I did mentoring was in fall of 2017). I will no longer be mentoring 1^st year MBA students at Rotman. I am not able to address what they perceive to be their urgent problems and needs.

I continue to examine and refocus my time on efforts which maximize the value and impact on my two purposes. (#1 Enabling current and emerging business leaders to succeed, #2 Enabling business leaders to have a positive impact on society).

My biggest learnings in the past three months:

The past 3 months have been an intense time of unlearning, and learning

• Unlearning is extremely hard and painful. Hard to admit that previous knowledge, facts, experience are now fatally flawed and would be very damaging if used today. Unlearning sometimes takes weeks. Many times, my brain has hurt as I was unlearning.  It felt as if it was being rewired.  I can understand why many people don’t unlearn.  Business psychologists have given me insights as to why unlearning is often impossible for many people.
• What really is networking? Most people have a limit of 150 other people they can have a social and intellectual relationship with.  The constraints are the intellectual and emotional energy needed to create and maintain a two-way relationship. I was surprised to discover how few people were in my business network.
• Learned about the core components of talent. The two most critical components are: self-awareness (understanding how others perceive us, perceive our competitive differentiation) and communications (specifically understanding how others perceive their urgent problems and needs.)  In about the 5^th century BC, Sun Tzu wrote in in The Art of War “Know the enemy and know yourself in a hundred battles you will never be in peril. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril.”
• Generative AI is software which creates content, such as text, that has never existed before. What is the ChatGPT-4 model? ChatGPT-4 doesn’t “understand” text in the human sense. It’s predicting text based on patterns it learned during training. How was it trained? 100s of terabytes of data from the web were read and processed to create a “database”.  This database has somewhere between 1.7 to 100 trillion parameters.  Each parameter is a floating-point number. Directions and questions to ChatGPT-4 are transformed into floating-point numbers, then analyzed using the “database”.  The result of the analysis is floating-point numbers which are then turning into text. Fundamentally, ChatGPT-4 can be viewed as an advanced form of a word predictor, but it’s a highly sophisticated one. It’s predicting text based on patterns it learned during training.  How did I find out the preceding information?  I asked ChatGPT-4 Turbo (the paid version).

Sharing my learnings

My website (https://koorandassociates.org/) contains my points-of-view regarding key issues and questions regarding value creation and growth in for-profit businesses. Each point-of-view is a brief article designed to enable discussion among founders, owners, shareholders, investors, CEOs, boards of directors, and advisory boards. I do not address not-for-profits, government, or other non-profit oriented organizations.

 Below are links to my website containing: new and revised points-of-view since my last update in December.

Links to my points-of-view articles:

Networking is key to value creation. V3

LP (Limited Partner) assessment of a fund. V5

Why will your company fail? V3

Strategic Advisor vs Coach VS Consultant. V2

AI talent – What is it?

What are the core components of talent? V4

Your company will fail. V1