Overview: Business

Analysing the impact of cultural diversity on corporate performance by feeding half-million Glassdoor reviews through a "Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling" machine learning algorithm: "the “bag of words” approach... inductively infers categories... a statistical model that looks for words that tend to co-occur."Step 1:…

Although this looks like someone looking for problems because of the apparent near-future success of "solutionism", some good points here: we need "an institution that will know what ... regulations to suspend (eg libraries and IPR) ... to fully leverage the potential inherent in digital technologies for the public good."Recent…

Great piece on the implications for creators of the shift to algorithmically managed content platforms."Vine was an entirely new cultural platform ... Twitter had unwittingly enabled the creation of a true subculture... [but] didn’t know how to make money from it... in contrast... TikTok has prospered because it generally seems to understa…

Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "or…

early adopters are not innovators, but are "willing to experiment... [but] they're not guinea pigs" make them feel they're getting something special, earlythey "are willing to work with your minimum viable product if it solves their problem" Give them something to test. But their reputation is on the line, so prove yo…

"A framework for building enduring products"Level 1 is to focus on growing uses completing the core action, which forms the product's foundation, usually correlates with retention. So design features which optimise for people completing the core action. Level 2 - retain users by creating accruing benefits: customer usage improves t…

"first mile of a product’s user experience is almost always an afterthought. The welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states, and the defaults ... the “top of your funnel” for engaging new users... increasingly neglected over time despite becoming more important ... products built for a tech-savvy ... early adopters …

"To create offerings that people truly want to buy... home in on the job the customer is trying to get done... Jobs are multifaceted... never simply about function... powerful social and emotional dimensions... the circumstances in which customers try to do them are more critical than any buyer characteristics" - so identify jobs curren…

"Focusing on individual features and experiences is good, but you should never forget about the position you’re trying to hold." Know "Which problems are good fits for you and which ones are bad fits?" so you don't build features for problems which are incoherent with your position.Snickers can’t take a feature request to …

The image is bad - it's a graph, not a grid, unless you can somehow make a negative investment. Anyway, the model distinguishes "between basic and differentiating features.. improving certain aspects only serves to maintain basic expectations, whereas improving other aspects can delight customers with less effort"Basic features sho…

"the most efficient way to operate during the earliest phases of a startup lies in between a formal business plan and unstructured iteration... documenting your initial product/market fit hypotheses, systematically validating each of the most uncertain hypotheses, and continually iterating on and updating [them] ... through customer validatio…

How to measure & optimise for product/market fit? Use this leading indicator: "just ask users “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?” and measure the percent who answer “very disappointed.” " You need at least 40%.Article goes through the process step by step, and comes with an interactive tool:A) Ask people who&…

Sets out a solution to the "TiVo problem": essentially, TiVo had the innovative product but not the content to operate it on. This usually ends badly for the innovator, who gets screwed by the incumbent, who has the distribution (eg ComCast). Despite the example, Tivo "did not fail... a patent troll of sorts... collected more than $…

Interesting longread on " Why the internet remains a tool of American hegemony", pointing out that " The internet was built by the U.S. military at the height of the Cold War and privatized into corporate America at the peak of anglophone neoliberal hegemony."There was a moment of freedom, when there were "millions of diff…

Andreessen Horowitz on sales channels, because "products often fail because the company chose the wrong route to market... A properly designed sales channel is a function of the product that you have built and the target... you wish to pursue."Presented as a function: the channel (c) is derived by a function (f) - distribution design - …

One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden w…

Approach to visualising Wikipedia category pages and their interconnections.

Not the only interesting piece on Trump viewed from ancient Greece."this election was something like a census of American Idiots... " defined using the classical Greek meaning of “people who are consumed only with self-interest". Any society with too many such idiots would be "consumed solely with self-interest... [and] cease …

What did I learn about learning as I explored using Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management to write five newsletters about disinformation in the 2020 US elections?

Today's social platforms' business models are not inevitable, but because we see them as such we constrain "the solution space we consider for combatting mis-/disinformation, polarization, and promotion of extremism... we need to consider what technologies [and] digital media to have a productive role in democratic societies".H…

Facebook's 2017 newsfeed algorithm tweak intentionally reduced traffic to left-leaning outlets " to avoid adding fuel to critics’ argument that the platform has an anti-conservative bias"... and overcorrected."Mother Jones saw a roughly $400,000 drop in the site’s annual revenue"

With more than a dozen congressional candidates appearing on ballots in November, Qanon is mainstream. While it looks like a lot of other conspiracy theories, this research provides a fascinating look at how the conspiracy's "Bakers" co-create their knowledgescape."QAnon doesn’t simply offer readers insider insight into current…

This article had me hooked from Line One - "Remember when the internet used to be fun?" - because I do. It tracks how "ironic, meme culture" (d)evolved from when "There was an assumption that everyone in the room “got it,” that they understood who was being satirized—the racists and the homophobes—and that everything was j…

538/IPSOS: Americans unimpressed with the president’s performance, but very few people changed their minds - shifts within margin of error. Biden wiped Trump in ratings of both performance and policy, with net favorability for Biden growing from 26 to 33 points.

I’m exploring how MyHub.ai could become a unique hybrid of personal publishing and productivity tools by launching a newsletter powered by Zettelkasten knowledge and idea management, all hosted on my Hub.

I'm (re)launching my newsletter to focus on disinformation during the 2020 US election. It's also part of a wider experiment in integrating Zettelkasten idea and knowledge management into my personal content strategy, hosted on MyHub.ai.

most crucial ... question to answer as a founder: “What exactly does your company do?” ... here are four storytelling blunders to avoid... [dont] spill an alphabet soup of generic industry buzzwords ... too much technical jargon ... [do] refocus on the problem you’re solving... concrete evidence of your company’s upside ...be succinct... clear…

What differentiates ... these schools is a basic assumption about where collaboration falls on a continuum between order and chaos. If you assume that collaboration is chaos and disorder, then it probably will be... if you assume that collaboration is an ordered, structured process, then you're bound to be disappointed ...middle way ... recog…

five global forces — asymmetry of wealth, disruption, age disparities, polarization, and loss of trust ... ADAPT... changing the way millions of people live and work. The pandemic has sharply accelerated these forces... leaders... have never faced so many dilemmas ... people look to leaders to provide stability, hope, and a path forward ... embody…

195 leaders in 15 countries over 30 global organizations... asked to choose the 15 most important leadership competencies... grouped the top ones into five major themes ... difficult to master... because improving them requires acting against our nature...high ethical standards conveys a commitment to fairness, instilling confidence ... when le…