Be A Builder
New Management Science, Sufficient Decentralization, and Organizational Transformation
👋 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⚡️
📚 Reading
👷🏻♀️ Stop Admiring the Problem...Be a Builder:
One of the most influential leaders in global business spends a minority of his time on typical “management.” His energy, skills, insights, and experience focus on “building.” Why? Because creating delightful products, services and experiences are how you compete in the digital era. This is the new management science of “being a builder.”
8-minute read by John Rossman in The Digital Leader Newsletter
🧬 Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks:
A social network achieves sufficient decentralization if two users can find each other and communicate, even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it. This implies that users can always reach their audience, which can only be true if developers can build many clients on the network [..] Achieving this only requires three decentralized features: the ability to claim a unique username, post messages under that name, and read messages from any valid name.
7-minute read by Varun Srinivasan
🎢 Organizational Transformation Is an Emotional Journey:
For emotions to be accelerators rather than inhibitors of transformation, leaders must put conditions in place in advance so that the transformation can come through this “pressure zone.” They must create psychological safety and construct mechanisms for all voices to be heard. And as the pressure increases, support, such as listening sessions and employee coaching, needs to increase along with it.
11-minute read by Andrew White, Michael Smets, Adam Canwell in HBR
🎧 Listening
🔮 How the Metaverse Will Revolutionize Everything:
There is sadness in the fact that the metaverse has become so entangled with a specific vision and of a company that is so controversial and, to a lesser extent, the crypto movement at large. Irrespective of the individual advocate, the individual product, technologies which may or may not be part of it: the metaverse is coming. It is extraordinarily important, it has been coming for decades, and we are now at the point in time in which we should be thinking about it.
70 minutes with Matthew Ball on The Realignment Podcast
🤯 Marketing, Mental Models, and Technology:
When labor becomes more creative, more joyful, and the school systems deteriorate more and more, could you actually argue it's better for them to be tinkering around on GitHub building smart contracts that pay people and they get paid, versus sitting in a classroom asking to go to the toilet and studying a textbook that hasn't evolved in 50 years?
87 minutes with George Mack on Infinite Loops
🤔 What can Web3 do that Web2 can't:
I think it's a magical new way to start a business if done right, and I think no one has really cracked the code on this, so it's a really interesting time and space [..] I think it plays to the Zeitgeist of this next generation where they don't want all of the profits to accrue to people at the top; they want to participate in building a business, participate in the proceeds of the business if the business does well. They want to shout from the rooftops and be proud of the thing they're associating with.
12 minutes with Frank Rotman on Cartoon Avatars
📬 Suggestions?
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