The Anticommons
Defending strategy, Innovation Economy disillusion, and lessons from urban planning (and AI, of course)
👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of technology, business, design, and culture. Three reads and three listens; no fluff, just stuff⚡️
We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely —E.O. Wilson
📚 Reading
In Defense of Strategy:
There’s a belief in tech that execution is all that matters, that strategy is for wimpy MBAs […] Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic […] companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the only ones that have a shot. The better you are at execution, the faster you can run in any direction. A good strategy helps you run fast in the right direction.
Packy McCormick—Not Boring | 24 minutes
Well Fed and Unsatisfied:
[T]his hollowing out of the psyche of our most innovative and productive people is a direct manifestation of organizational and structural degradation […] Keep in mind that although corporations have technically existed for centuries (dating back at least to the Dutch East India Company), the modern corporation is but a century old. It was and is an important evolution, but it is most certainly not the ideal final form […] We can do better. We will do better.
Eric Dickinger—Uncorrelated Interests | 17 minutes
Tragedy of the Uncommon:
In the digital world, people can try out many different products and methods and jump between them at the click of a button […] weshould constantly ask ourselves whether the current state of affairs is good, we should try to adopt openness and integration as the default, and we should design environments and systems that allow us to continue to experiment, rather than get locked in.
Dror Poleg | 9 minutes
🎧 Listening
Dancing with Complexity:
Most people, designers in particular, are really thinking about components in the stuff of systems, even if it's not physically a product, but a digital experience [ …] We aren't as humans naturally doing as much of the thinking of what is flowing between them. That's where a systems view helps to illuminate [..] connections that you wouldn't see if you were taking a very analytical piece by piece, part by part reductionist look.
Jen Briselli—Otherminding | 70 minutes
Threads
It's fascinating how much the CEOs of these social media companies drive who the audience actually is. And for something where we always think, you know, technology should be neutral, and it's not: no, no, who's leading the company and what they are building is so tied to what they are building and the audience that it attracts. And it's so obvious with someone like Elon Musk.
Tony Cowan-Brown—Another Podcast | 43 minutes
Distribution Disruption:
Companies are run by business people; they want to make the company grow; they want to reach scale. Scale is inherently incompatible with the creative pursuit because creative works become less and less valuable as you scale them and you need to keep creating new things, And so there's this tension where […] business side of things, always seeing creative people as the anchor that drags them down, and they both wish they didn't need each other
Alex Schleiffer—People vs Algorithms | 70 minutes