👋 On time for your weekend: a round-up of this week’s remarkable stories at the intersection of #technology, #business, #design, and #culture.
📚 Reading
Common Beliefs, Not Common Behaviors:
When we strive for “alignment”, insisting that each unit behave in the same internal way, we exacerbate the separation between ourselves and our customers, or users. This is even more the case when an organization is an active participant in one or more ecosystems, and when that participation takes the form of many different independent partnerships.
😶🌫️ 5-minute read by Bill Fisher in Drucker Forum
The Integrator Burden:
[W]e don't discuss connecting, caring, and cohering nearly as much. Part of that is that integration often falls on underrepresented and marginalized groups. These individuals know that organizations are not an idealized Venn diagram of "aligned incentives" glued together by meritocracy. They sense the cracks and the edges and want to help and support, and know if they don't, no one will.
😔 4-minute read by John Cutler in The Beautiful Mess
The Atom, The Bit And The Gene: Silicon Valley’s Innovator’s Dilemma
The similarity of the atom, the bit and the gene as elemental concepts is hard to miss and they’ve allowed us to understand our universe in a visceral, substantial way. Still, they arose in vastly different domains and have been largely applied to separate and distinct fields. In the future, however, we can expect vastly greater convergence between the three.
👩🏻🔬 6-minute read by Greg Satell in Digital Tonto
🎧 Listening
Metaverse - beyond the buzzword:
All of this stuff coalesced through experimentation, trail and error, network effects, people scrambling over each other, people trying to build stuff that was useful [..] This whole sense now that is was all obvious and of course that's how it worked…
🤓 40-minute chat with Toni Cowan-Brown and Benedict Evans on Another Podcast
Technological Revolutions:
The foundations are now set and what is interesting going forward is going to be on top of those foundations [..] To say the end of the beginning, is not to say innovation is over or that changes are finished. It is to say, actually the innovations and changes are only getting started! They're less about new tech and more about how is this actually going to transform society and the way we live.
🤗 69-minute chat with Ben Thompson and James Allworth on Exponent
How DNA Makes Us Who We Are:
I have come to think, genetic influence is more a matter of appetites. It's what you like to do, it's how you spend your mental energy, more than aptitudes. People think of genetics as hardwiring the brain [..] I think it gives you these nudges in certain directions. And that's also important to recognise, because the other problem people have with genetics is they think of it as fatalistic. It's genetic: it's determined and you can't do anything about it.
🧬 82-minute chat with Robert Plomin on Infinite Loops
👷🏻♀️👷🏻♂️ Our Work
Presentation on When Users Innovate at the 5th R&D Innovation conference.
📬 Suggestions?
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