👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture.
Three articles and three podcasts wrestled from this week's relentless algorithmic feeds and icky click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
Thoughtforms will take a break for the next three weeks—reculer pour mieux sauter. Back on Friday, September 23rd.
📚 Reading
🏴☠️ Don’t Let Hierarchy Stifle Innovation:
Much of the know-how required for innovation comes from the bottom of the organization — in other words, from local knowledge. Yet many non-management employees consider innovation outside the scope of their jobs. Even when they want to participate, they don’t because the organization’s tacit norms discourage it. The pressure to execute and remove variance overwhelms the motivation to innovate and introduce variance.
7-minute read by Timothy Clark in Harvard Business Review
🧐 Non-Coercive Marketing: A Primer:
Non-coercive marketing places full authority and trust in people. It creates the conditions under which they can make empowered decisions for themselves, and do so in their own time. It doesn't seek to persuade, manipulate, or pester people into a decision that's already been made for them. It merely opens new doors, tells the truth about what's behind those doors, then surrenders the outcome, trusting that the right people will step through when they're ready.
19-minute read by Rob Hardy in Ungated
👯 Community:
Community is the antithesis of the Algorithm. Community is Luke, Leia, Hans and Chewy. The Algorithm is Darth. Community stands as the last frontier of real own-able audience connection in a world of unreliable digital distribution. Community gives us a network of loyalists, of people that care enough to connect and create on our behalf, whose energy we delicately direct to our own selfish ends.
18-minute read by Troy Young in People vs Algorithms
🎧 Listening
🎈💸 Bubbles, Finance and the EMH:
You can do a lot of bubbles as this positive feedback loop. Like, I think Moore's law in software is a really classic example where Microsoft was always building software that would be able to run on the next generation of Intel chips, Intel is always building chips that will be able to run the next generation of Microsoft software. So they just keep pushing each other forward [..] and the the feedback loop just made both of those industries really huge.
62 minutes with Byrne Hobart on Narratives Podcast
📱🤯 This Is Your Brain On iPhone:
We're insulated from pain; we have access to almost infinite pleasures without having to work for them. That's really important because the way that our ancient neural machinery is wired, is for us to be the ultimate seekers, to be motivated to work very hard to get very modest pleasure. And now, the world we're living in, we have access to very potent pleasures—much more potent than our brains can handle
56 minutes with Anna Lembke on Big Technology Podcast
📱🤖 The Ascent of Information: Life in The Human Dataome:
A common sentiment among the smartphone enabled human population is that we not only don't own our data, but our data owns us, or at least the pressure of responsibility to keep providing data to the internet and its devices and the general project of human knowledge construction implicates us. The evolution of a vast, mysterious, largely inevitable self-organizing system that has grabbed the reigns of our economies and cultures
82 minutes with Caleb Scharf on Complexity Podcast
📬 Suggestions?
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