👋 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 algorithmic feeds and click-bait chum. No fluff, just stuff⚡️
📚 Reading
🤓 Too Big To Think: Why Prestigious Institutions Stopped Generating Good Ideas
As organizations grow, they inevitably add rules, structure, layers, and policies to manage the complexity. This comes with many tradeoffs, many of which are worth it, but it’s quite hard to scale effectively while still cultivating an environment where weirdos can thrive [..] No single person is deciding that creativity should be eradicated but as a byproduct of systems needed to manage large-scale enterprises, the result is the same.
18-minute read by Paul Millerd in Boundless
⏲ A long delayed golden age: or why has the ICT ‘installation period’ lasted so long?
[L]onger lives that have allowed traditional leaders in politics and business to remain in place until their 70s and even 80s. The importance of the latter resides in the creation of a ‘glass ceiling’ for the digital natives, whose capacity to innovate with the paradigm––both technologically and institutionally––is much greater than that of the generations who learned to innovate within the mass production principles, and who are still in power.
7-minute read by Carlota Perez in Medium
🤯 Does not compute. How social media breaks society:
[T[he issue isn’t just one in which some individuals receive bad information, but rather one in which we all engage with each other a little differently, we are all part of the problem. And because we are all part of the problem, we could conceivably improve upon the situation by modeling better behavior, working together to establish healthier norms, and exercising self-restraint.
10-minute read by Ryan Avent in The Bellows
🎧 Listening
🫣 How to overcome the resistance to your ideas:
Jobs theory really espouses this idea that what really matters is the progress people are trying to make in their life, not the products that enable them to make that progress [..] Entrepreneurs fixate on the fuel instead of the friction; it's because they've got that product orientation instead of a progress orientation. Once you realize what business you're really in, all of a sudden, friction becomes part of the consciousness.
34 minutes with David Schonthal on Lancefield on the Line
🤔 What's next for advertising?
Whereas now the story you want to tell, and the whole creative vision why does this thing exist and why would you ask somebody to buy it, might come before the advertising, before the store, before the distribution, maybe even before the product [..] Because your brand is maybe yourself, and then you figured out "there is a whole audience of people who want the same thing as me", and you build the product.
32 minutes with Toni Cowan-Brown, Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
🔌 Power Grids: Network Topology & Governance
The grid was not planned as sort of a single thing. Nobody sat down one day and got out a box of crayons and started drawing things on a map and said, this is what the grid should look like. It's a system that has [..] was really built around connecting natural resources to places where you would want to actually use electricity. The original drivers of the grid are very different things that we think about today. This is not wind and sun. This is water, natural gas or oil.
67 minutes with Seth Blumsack on Complexity
📬 Suggestions?
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