Profundity
Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur. Whatever’s said in Latin seems profound.
Author: Bud Caddell
Conway’s Law
Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. Conway’s Law.
The Network is the Strategy
What’s changed is that competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections. Strategy, therefore, must be focused on deepening and widening networks of information, talent, partners, and consumers. Brands, in effect, have become more than assets to be leveraged, but platforms for collaboration. Greg Satell
Airbnb’s Self Directed Teams
What managers don’t do is give orders, set goals, and define processes. The expectation is that engineers, motivated by Airbnb’s mission and equipped with enough information by their managers, will figure those things out themselves. “It’s not your manager’s responsibility to tell you how to have impact,” says Curtis. […] Where Airbnb has standardized around processes, it’s generally a bottom-up process, lightly steered by management. In meetings, Curtis and his engineering managers tell stories about […]
Netflix’s Data Tenents
Data should be accessible, easy to discover, and easy to process for everyone. Whether your dataset is large or small, being able to visualize it makes it easier to explain. The longer you take to find the data, the less valuable it becomes. Excerpted from this slideshare by Jeff Magnusson, Manager, Data Platform Architecture at Netflix.
Cost of Network Acquisition is the New Cost of Entry
This is the reality that Brad and I stared at in 2003 as we were developing our initial investment thesis for USV. We saw the cloud coming but did not want to invest in commodity software delivered in the cloud. So we asked ourselves, “what will provide defensibility” and the answer we came to was networks of users, transactions, or data inside the software. We felt that if an entrepreneur could include something other than […]
Constructive Uncertainty
So, we as individuals and as leaders should actively promote dissent in group decision making, not for the sake of dissent itself, but for its ability to spark divergent thinking and to guide people past the sharing and preference biases lurking in the dark shadows of our minds. Constructive uncertainty is a required skill for the 21st century.
Complex Systems Literacy
I gave a talk at TEDx Indianapolis on the importance of respecting complex systems.
An Absurd Position
Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one. Voltaire
Escaping Old Ideas
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. John Maynard Keynes
Get Aligned
Here’s a simple but powerful exercise: Put your company’s or your client’s key stakeholders in a room together. Have the person with the most senior title agree that it’s a safe place for the next hour or so. Like Switzerland. First ask everyone what their next year’s objectives are. Write them down. Next ask everyone what they’re measured by. What their compensation is tied to, what makes their boss happy, what empty cells in a […]
Failures at Amazon
I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures. You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia. None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter. What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary […]
Technologically Boring
Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring… It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen. Clay Shirky
Taste as Mastery of Change
Taste now comes from a mastery of change, not a mastery of status. […] Cool is an outsider’s sensibility now completely internalized, built into every individual and our entire culture. […] it is anthropologically more rewarding, I think, to see cool as a measure of our culture’s ability to absorb conflicting impulses and embrace contradiction. Grant McCracken
Fans as Lead Users
Fans are lead users – early adopters of new products and properties but also early adapters who retrofit those materials to better serve their needs; studying how they modify media properties may help companies to better identify otherwise unnoticed flaws and potentials. Henry Jenkins
Noisy and Public
If old consumers were assumed to be passive, then new consumers are active. If old consumers were predictable and stayed where you told them, then new consumers are migratory, showing a declining loyalty to networks or media. If old consumers were isolated individuals, then new consumers are more socially connected. If the work of media consumers was once silent and invisible, then new consumers are now noisy and public. Henry Jenkins
People Still Care About Privacy
Privacy isn’t a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation. It’s about controlling what information flows where and adjusting measures of trust when things flow in unexpected ways. It’s about creating certainty so that we can act appropriately. People still care about privacy because they care about control. danah boyd
Strong at the Broken Places
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. Ernest Hemingway
How to save American Apparel
This post was originally sent to Standard General, the investment firm which has assumed 44% ownership in American Apparel, on July 9th of this year. No word yet in response. At my company, NOBL – a strategic consultancy, we help large and ambitious organizations prepare for and profit from disruption. We’re also Angelenos, with an office right in American Apparel’s backyard, so we want to see the retailer regain its footing and continue its mission […]
Nike and the Future of the Fuelband
Late Friday, CNET reported that Nike had made the decision to turn away from wearable hardware: Nike is gearing up to shutter its wearable-hardware efforts, and the sportswear company this week fired the majority of the team responsible for the development of its FuelBand fitness tracker, a person familiar with the matter told CNET. Here’s why Nike did it: Wearable tech is innovating faster outside of the company than it ever will inside the company. Wearable sensors are […]