👋 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
😵💫 We Need To Shift Our Mindsets To Compete In An Ecosystem-Driven World:
Competitive advantage can no longer be reduced to the sum of efficiencies in a value chain, but is embedded in webs of connections. To compete in an ecosystem-driven world, leaders need to do more than adapt how we deploy assets, we need to look at things differently. It is no longer enough to merely plan and direct action, we need to inspire and empower belief [..] Today your fate depends less on the assets and capabilities you control, than what you can access.
5-minute read by Greg Satell
🤷♂️ Repeating the mistake of abstracting social connections in system design:
I am far more interested in how we teach real decentralised methods to deploy technology that can solve real problems for real teams, and then scale up fractally from below to create more robust and responsive organisational structures [..] Early automation strategies in organisations tended to begin as centralised services, naturally enough, but we now have far more local tools that can be used in a more distributed way without IT input.
4-minute read by Lee Bryant in Postshift Linklog
🔮 How to Future:
It turns out that the present is very hard to see. First the present is obscured by the noise of 8 billion lives looking for attention, and it is overwhelmed by the flashy glitter of the new. Mostly the now is obscured by our deep assumptions and prejudices which makes it very difficult to actually see what is going on. We have labels which are handy, but can often misled us [..] Perceiving the present as it really is, is perhaps the greatest challenge for seeing the future.
6-minute read by Kevin Kelly
🎧 Listening
💡 Truly Understanding Your Customers:
We try to capture so much data to actually avoid talking with a customer, talking with a person, dealing with a human. We can just use the data and there's comfort in that because it feels exact [..] You're going to gather a lot of insight by engaging with customers directly. God forbid, but if you engage with them directly, you can gather a lot more with less effort than trying to just amass this large amount of information that makes you feel comfortable.
40 minutes with Andrea Olson on Lancefield on the Line
🫣 Building, Web3, Collapsing Trust, and Realignments:
[M]aybe we live in a world where we can no longer build top-down institutions that people trust, that have authority and that have power. Instead of building hierarchies what we should do is build bottom-up networks. And maybe that's where people are going to put their trust in the future. Maybe they are going to be even more participatory than these institutions of the past; maybe they fit better with the ethic of the times—they are inherently more egalitarian.
84 minutes with Marc Andreessen on The Realignment Podcast
🗺 The Pathless Path:
If you're not drawn to do the things you know you care about, something's wrong. So then you need to just take a step back. And that should be the analyze all options to reclaim that energy. I think the more challenging thing is a large number of people don't have those things yet or at least have forgotten that state of mind of deep curiosity and energy or just haven't explored that [..] I think what most people do want is a one-month break from worker mode.
77 minutes with Paul Millerd on Infinite Loops
📬 Suggestions?
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