👋 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
🌲 Leadership In An Ecosystem Age: Secrets For Success
In a rapidly changing world with greater uncertainty, we need to focus on creating larger and more diverse supply networks that can provide much greater flexibility without sacrificing specialization. Also [..] there is considerable potential to be gained by creating a broader network of third parties to help develop new products, and even new businesses, as product life cycles continue to shrink.
8-minute read by Bill Fischer in Forbes
😰 When terrible things happen to good innovation projects…
Do not assume that you already have the answers. Do not assume that your new venture will behave like your existing business. Do not load people, tech and overhead onto it. Do not promise that it will be delivering funds in a short payback period. You really don’t want to end up like Drinkworks or Zillow Offers.
8-minuted read by Rita McGrath
📈 Prosperity Gospel:
[M]ost NFT investors are less interested in personally acquiring them than in imagining a future buyer who may want to do so once they become available. The speculative potential of hazy promises of exclusive access ironically depends on perpetuating a sense of inclusion, in the form of finding new investors to inflate the price of an unproductive asset whose value depends on popularity alone.
13-minute read by Evan Malmgren in Real Life
🎧 Listening
👻 Twitter's Elon Musk Era Begins:
Twitter always has been slow to roll out changes. They have told me that's because they're test-driven: they run tests of new ideas to see how it affects user behavior and performance. Frankly, that is not how you create the next Tesla. Elon is a very different person: he gets an idea about what people might want [..] and he just kind of manifests it. That's a completely different way of running a company.
47 minutes with Christopher Mims on Big Technology Podcast
👊 Supercharged Teams:
The old model of leadership of command and control, kind of managing down, is very passee and very broken [..] But the other way is equally true. You can't any longer as a team use the excuse "well, I've got a bad leader" as to why you're unhappy and why you're not achieving things [..] Manage up and sell up and impact your leaders in a way to have the results of the team that you want.
43 minutes with Pam Hamilton on Wicked Podcast
🧽 Too Many Meetings: Spring Clean!
Hybrid work, which is all good, but I suggest before even going and adding another layer of technology which makes it even more complex for your people and think that technology is going to solve the issue for you: it will not most likely. It's you as a leader and leadership team (it doesn't only mean the senior guys, it can be anyone who's working together with people): do this spring cleaning.
6 minutes with ANDfutureproof
📬 Suggestions?
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