This week’s highlights:  Baby-Formula, Agile Teams, and the Problem With Fast Food Hamburgers

Fifteen on Friday – 05/04/18 – Issue 283

Food for Thought:

1. Bloomberg – The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code.  Bill Benter did the impossible: He wrote an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. Close to a billion dollars later, he tells his story for the first time.
2. NYT – The Baby-Formula Crime Ring – Credit TP – It’s Pricey, It’s Portable, Its Users Need It Constantly, And Retailers Love To Buy It At a Discount. All Of Which Makes It A Perfect Product To Steal.
3. Telegraph – Why you’ll never understand the US unless you’ve been to Nashville – Credit DH
4. NYT – Middle-Class Families Increasingly Look to Community Colleges. With college prices in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, more middle-class families are looking for ways to spend less for quality education.
5. VC  –  Video: A Timelapse of Dubai’s Astonishing Growth.  Dubai’s transformation from a fishing village to a global real estate hub has been nothing short of remarkable. From having the world’s tallest building to man-made islands in the shape of a world map, the U.A.E.’s most populous city has never shied away from ambitious construction projects.

Business/Economics:

1. HBR – Agile at Scale.  Agile teams started in software development, but are now moving to the broader enterprise.  This aligns nicely with Stan McCrystal’s concept of Team of Teams.
2. TVG – When Buying A Good Business, Don’t Be Good Deal Focused
3. Bloomberg – The Man Who Could Eat Half the Profit in Fund Management. Q&A with the former CEO of AllianceBernstein and pay-for-alpha proponent.  Meet fulcrum fees in the mutual fund world
4. NYT – Bernardo Hees of Kraft Heinz: ‘New Mistakes Are Welcome’  A powerful force in the food business defends a famously frugal culture — and admits C.E.O.s don’t have all the answers.
5. Guardian – Why we should bulldoze the business school.  There are 13,000 business schools on Earth. That’s 13,000 too many. And I should know – I’ve taught in them for 20 years.

Culture/Tech/Science:

1. ReCode – Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history.  “It’s a colossal pump-and-dump scheme, the likes of which the world has never seen.” says the Founder of PayPal and former CEO of Intuit.
2. NYT – A Fast-Food Problem: Where Have All the Teenagers Gone?
3. WashPo – I tried the Big Mac, Whopper and Dave’s Single. They share the same major flaw.
4. WireCutter – The Best Antivirus Is Not Traditional Antivirus.
5. GEN – CRISPR-Cas9 Improved 10,000-Fold by Synthetic Nucleotides.  Precision gene editing comes closer and closer to a scalable reality.