Issue #28: Leadership, Design and Honey.
Forgive me if I’m a little cynical, and find it a little disingenuous, that Tim Cook is taking a leadership position in the anti-other-tech-cos camp as he sermonizes around the world about privacy and the weaponization of our personal data. You’d be forgiven if you assumed that Moore’s Law didn’t apply to the ever increasing cost of the iPhone. How about Apple make the next generation of iPhones, with their vaunted privacy policy/settings, cheap enough for the vast majority of consumers who trade their attention and privacy for access? Pretty certain the company can afford the product price drop. But I guess we won’t be able to divert our gaze to any thorough assessments of capitalism if our focus is on the privacy we lost a long time ago…
This week, we touch on accelerated growth and death, UBI and
Articles
As it comes to light that Uber might IPO in 2019, and it starts to tout everything from UberEats to Uberemployment, a word of warning from Howard Schultz in ‘Onward’ (a few years after closing 600 stores, firing 12k employees and losing 78% of its stock value) might suffice '“Growth, we now know all too well, is not a strategy. It is a tactic. And when undisciplined growth became a strategy for Starbucks, we lost our way.”
Design thinking is now baked into most of the products and, truth be told, whether you’re thinking about it or not, most of the experiences you partake in or create are designed. Here’s a collection of design principles of some of the biggest tech firms today. Worth a browse.
I read this Bloomberg piece on the early days of the Net Promoter Score while I was in b-school. ’Would You Recommend Us’ was revelatory then. And it’s worth a reread now.
MIT Sloan opened up their research pages for a 3-day period a few weeks ago. I gobbled a few articles and this research on what it takes to be a ’Game-Changing Leader’ is one I recommend. First tip? Ignore the phrase 'game-changing’.
I love the systems approach to thinking about the world, the connectedness of everything. But I’ve also gotten feedback that it can get woolly and esoteric at times. For that I offer this article on Wicked Problems and the practicality of the approach for disasters like Hurricane Sandy (longread).
Even as more and more people own mobile computers, even with hybrid computer notebook attempts by Rocketbook and Evernote, trusty paper-based Moleskins and Leuchtturms still continue to fly off the shelves.
There was a time we thought we would never see another Red Hat. But, after IBM acquired the company, more people are paying attention to a business model that’s stealthily spawned a host of $100M revenue generating upstarts. IBM is obviously trying to counter Microsoft’s push into the developer community (Microsoft recently acquired Github) but the real question is, when will these acquisitive companies turn back to truly being innovative? Can they?
Apparently, driverless cars will not ease congestion.
If Universal Basic Income is such a good thing, why does Douglas Rushkoff think it’s a Silicon Valley scam? He suggests 'Under the guise of compassion, UBI really just turns us from stakeholders or even citizens to mere consumers. Once the ability to create or exchange value is stripped from us, all we can do with every consumptive act is deliver more power to people who can finally, without any exaggeration, be called our corporate overlords.’
Product
I’ve probably recommended Honey before. Earlier, while ordering holiday cards that were already 50% off, the honey browser extension (available for most browsers) automatically found me a further 25% off my final price! It’ll be getting a lot of use this holiday period.
Books
Very few books about the future of technology have a positive spin nowadays. Our books, movies, shows etc. reflect our cultural temperature. Thankfully, Tim O'Reilly decides to take a positive spin on our technological future. ’WTF: What’s The Future And Why It’s Up To Us’ is a much needed positive take.
City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age is a coffee table book. But it’s not. It’s a light read. But it’s not. It’s about the city of the past but it’s about the now and what we need to do to secure the future of our cities.
’Milk and Honey’ will make you uncomfortable. You must read it.
All the very best this week!
Seyi