Overview: Business

when it comes to teams, many hands do not make light work... four to six members is the team best size for most tasks, that no work team should have more than 10 members, and that performance problems and interpersonal friction increase “exponentially as team size increases.”... if you are on a big team that keeps screwing up... try some subtract…

the GEM framework... to deliver value ... the company must never lose sight of ... growth, engagement, and monetization.... Growth is all about how a company finds new users or customers.... getting the right message in front of people who need what you have... “external triggers.” ... delivered through various channels.... The growth question to…

research aims to capture the shifts and trends that are shaping modern digital transformation.... 5 Key Takeaways: - A successful digital transformation is an enterprise-wide effort that is best served by a leader with broad organizational purview... - Market pressures are the leading drivers ... - growing acknowledgment of the importance of …

What is data journalism? What is it for? What might it do? What opportunities and limitations does it present? Who and what is involved in making and making sense of it?

managers always have to balance the merits of teamwork... with the dangers of “groupthink”... Large groups are remarkably good, on average, at estimating such things as the number of beans in a jar or the weight of a prize calf. But that accuracy relies on the guesses being independent.... Modern communication methods mean that collaboration is mo…

In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... They often procrastinate, and that's how they incubate ideas.... Their parents focus more on values than rules... One of the risks is, you know, you have everybody marching in a different…

Celebrating a small milestone for the K4P project on Medium.

An article I ghost-wrote for META's CEO to launch their Innovation Platform (which I and my team there built)

One of the most important things when working together is to be clear on who is helping who with what and why... I’m trying to make working together effortless by showing how easy it is to map what’s actually going on when people collaborate. You can normally draw it out on a page. It normally doesn’t take longer than an hour or two.... I call the…

the Knowledge Pyramid... DIKW pyramid, it features data as the basis and shows how information is built on it, then knowledge, and finally wisdom.... implies that the higher you go the better things get... What’s not to like? Well, just about everything.

Jane.ai, an artificially intelligent platform that indexes data from cloud storage providers, teams, and more... allows employees to search through its corpus using conversational language...an intuitive, intelligent AI-powered Teammate who gives employees instant access to the information they need to do their jobs well.

the actual value of a business largely rests on defensibility... we’ve developed a Network Effects Map to help founders ... build an informed defensibility strategy. ... helping founders dissect the often-hidden yet highly intentional forces behind technology’s most successful companies... a vocabulary for discussing complex and interrelated co…

The same amazing tech that enables people to forge deeper relationships, foster closer communities and give everyone a voice can also breed isolation, embolden racists, and empower digital bullies and nefarious actors.... used with great accuracy and potency “to assault... truth and trust... our personal foundations — our privacy and sense of ide…

Managing a Medium Publication to share our the journey as we build Knowledge4Policy: "share our experiences … as transparently as possible, and invite ideas and perspectives from experts in evidence-based policymaking around the world"

... they have recently embarked on a journey to become “Agile.”... neither explicit support nor discouragement from senior executives... they are failing for the same list of reasons as every other team I have met with in the last 5 years. Here are those reasons:... 1. There is no clear vision for the product....The “idea” has been handed down …

it’s leaps-and-bounds more useful to prototype your UX with a user’s real content than it is to test with real ML models... By re-orienting the conventional AI paradigm from finding ways to make the machine smarter, to exploring ways to augment human capability, we can unlock far greater potential in machine learning... we have a tremendous opp…

If using a beautiful content management system doesn’t miraculously solve a media company’s cash flow problems, what will? If short videos, or elaborate commenting systems, or mobile storytelling, or interactive graphics, or Snapchat Stories, or Instagram hashtags, or Instant Articles, or Google AMP, or programmatic advertising, or native advertis…

Deep learning’s advances are the product of pattern recognition: neural networks memorize classes of things ... But almost all the interesting problems in cognition aren’t classification problems at all... The systems are greedy because they demand huge sets of training data. Brittle because when... confronted with scenarios that differ from the …

We made a fake news detector with above a 95% accuracy (on a validation set) that uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing that you can download here. In the real world, the accuracy might be lower... we decided to just try and scrape domains that were known fake, real, satire, etc. and see if we could build a data set quickly... Th…

The News Quality Scoring (NQS) will combine quality journalism content with new machine learning algorithms... as batch of stories enter the platform, they are scored on a 1-5 scale ... quality ... automatically and in real time.... Quantifiable Signals ... look at structure and patterns of the HTML page, advertising density, use of visual eleme…

“death by PowerPoint,”... sucks the life and energy out of ... meetings... spreadsheets rife with errors and macro miscalculations. Email and chat facilitate ... inbox overload ... So what makes artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) champions confident that their technologies will be immune to comparably counterproductive outcomes? ... …

“data is the new oil” ... your company can consider itself lucky. You collected all this data, and then it turned out you were sitting on an oil reserve ... when you have that sort of luck, it is probably a good idea to ask “Are we really that lucky?”... the data you are sitting on now... accumulated over time, is the type of data used to build t…

GDS does have a clear function and is learning from its experiences ... struggled to demonstrate the value of flagship initiatives... or to set out key priorities.... Another criticism ... not sustained its framework of standards and guidance, with some being removed and web links broken... leave scope for interpretation and disagreement... somet…

Progress has been sporadic, but... plenty of observers wouldn’t have expected this much of GDS when it was set up in 2011... It made its mark largely because it had Maude, the senior minister in the Cabinet Office and a heavyweight in the Conservative Party, fully engaged and ready to back GDS chief Mike Bracken in inter-departmental tussles... i…

people started sharing selfies on Facebook and stories around the office. Participants gained new insight into the workings of other departments. People realized they faced common issues and brought new perspectives to problems. Ideas for future collaborations and projects took root. It was assisted serendipity in action... this evolved...into r…

Artificial intelligence has been hailed as the last invention human beings will ever create. Universal basic income... is now being discussed openly .... Design thinking has entered mainstream business lexicon ... These three unique concepts will have a powerful impact on work in the coming decades... If some people do not have to work to surviv…

The things that you can change (depth of the network, the activation function, the learning rate, etc.) are called hyperparameters. So by clicking around in the playground, you are "modifying the hyperparameters of a feedforward multilayer neural network".

a four-factor definition of what I consider to be a vertical AI startup:... full-stack fully-integrated solution to the end customer problem from the interface ... down the stack to the functionality, models, and data;... deep subject matter expertise... trust, respect, and relationships within the industry.... combine the subject matter and tec…

startups today need to build systems of intelligence™ — AI powered applications — “the new moats.”... SaaS and cloud services can have strong economies of scale; ... your product or service has “network effects” if each additional user ... accrues more value to every other user;... Proprietary software or methods is where most technology compan…

Here’s a discussion of the way machine learning-first startups are built, which ones are pushing the ecosystem forward, and why they look so different than the SaaS startups that came before them... you can do very interesting things with IBM Watson... if you spend a few months and a significant amount of money training it... their marketing claim…