👋 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 internet clickbait and algorithmic feeds. No fluff, and signal over noise ⚡️
📚 Reading
🔮 How This All Happened:
If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented…If you saw the price of homes, college tuition, and health care, you’d be shocked. Our politics would blow your mind. And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong.
23-minute read by Morgan Housel at Collaborative Fund
🤖 When Is a New Tech' Ahead of Its Time’ — Or Just Doomed?
[F]or a technology to have serious technical promise, it usually has a set of proximal next steps. Early microprocessors were expensive and janky, but one could imagine the proximal industrial processes that would make them cheaper, and make it possible to produce them in sizeable enough quantities — at which point you get the personal computer. These were all steps of magnitude but not direction; of quantity but not essential quality.
7-minute read by Clive Thompson in OneZero
🙋🏻♀️ Individuals matter:
One way to address this problem [of complexity in a company with thousands of engineers] is by reducing the perceived complexity of the problem via imagining that individuals are fungible, making the system more legible…it's highly scalable, and if there's one thing that tech companies like, it's doing things that scale, and treating a complex system like it's SimCity or Civilization is highly scalable.
19-minute read by Dan Luu
🎧 Listening
💪 The Power to Change:
Most of the problem is that we have very high IQ leaders, and what they really need is to be high EQ, and to engage people and influence them to change. Because leadership is not about hierarchy anymore, it's about influencing, and that is about helping people to want to change. To me, that's the definition of leadership.
39 minutes with Campbell MacPherson on The Wicked Podcast
🙏 The Value of Being More Coach-Like:
"I am empowering you is an inherently contradicting statement." It doesn't feel like the power really shifted…But it can work as a helpful shorthand, which is...I'm trying to find the best way for people to fully express their potential and their skills; I'm trying to ensure that the organization has the right people holding the right amount of responsibility and accountability at the right level of that organization.
54 minutes with Michael Bungay Stanier on Leadermorphosis
🧐 Good ideas and bad ideas for regulation:
I worry a little bit that we wind designing legislation that's specific to a point in time, and as technology evolves and business models evolve, they don't really address the fundamental issues. By analogy, I like to describe it as adding epicycles to a geocentric universe: as opposed to looking for a deeper theory and finding a heliocentric universe that suddenly explains everything much better.
19 minutes with Marshall Van Alstyne on Concurrences
👷🏻♀️👷 Friends’ Work
The Corporate Innovation Academy with a chef’s menu of hard-won lessons by innovation practitioners distilled from world-renowned brands. Adriana chips in with a class on Ecosystem Innovation.
📬 Suggestions?
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