Dozen Worthy Reads ?? (No. 93)
Hi! I hope you all are doing great! I came across this ad that I thought was brilliant but I wonder how many people actually know this game. Either way, brilliant portrayal (at least to me)
Here are this week’s reads
Growth, Marketing, Product, and Sales
1) The State of the Marketing Industry in 2019: 7 Trends to Watch Out For [LINK]
- Neuromarketing
- Multicultural Marketing
- Cognitive Computing-Powered Customer Service
- Shows
- Podcasting
- Word of Mouth Marketing
- Historical Optimization
2) Instagram needs stars and it has built a team to find them [LINK]
The creators and emerging talent partnerships team at Instagram is larger than just Antony. He works with three others to find emerging talent, but there are 40 employees in total, including people whose job it is to make sure that traditional celebrities get the support they need to create. All of these creators — or “managed partners,” as Instagram calls them — appreciate the hands-on help. In return, they churn out content, which is the thing Instagram needs most to make IGTV “the future of video.”
3) A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems [LINK]
“Problems are constant in life. When you solve your health problem by buying a gym membership, you create new problems, like having to get up early to get to the gym on time, sweating like a meth-head for thirty minutes on an elliptical, and then getting showered and changed for work so you don’t stink up the whole office. When you solve your problem of not spending enough time with your partner by designating Wednesday night “date night”, you generate new problems, such as figuring out what to do every Wednesday that you both won’t hate…Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.”
Strategy
4) Outgrowing Advertising: Multimodal Business Models as a Product Strategy [LINK]
Product success is not just about having a good product, but also having the right business model(s). Expanding sources of revenue pushes us to think beyond what we know, and creates the infrastructure that opens up new opportunities. In this post, I will use consumer entertainment apps (books, podcasts, videos, and music) as a lens into the different business models and product strategies of Chinese companies. Thinking about content consumption in a mobile-first way in China has enabled these new business models, which not only provide diversified revenue streams for businesses, but also allow users to make better, more flexible purchasing decisions.
Life Hacks
5) Why books don’t work [LINK]
All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it.
6) Your human-size life [LINK]
I thought then this was puzzling, I didn't get it, but now, with the benefit of almost 30 years of hindsight, I realize he was totally right. One of the biggest mistakes rich people make is to try to live larger than a single human being can. A mathematical impossibility. You can buy a big house, but you can only sleep in one bedroom at a time. You can own twenty fantastic cars, airplanes and yachts, but you can only be in one at a time. You can own an NBA team and a MLB team, and you get to sit in the nicest seat in the house at games, but you still can only sit in one seat. In other words, your humanity doesn't increase just because your wealth did. You don't get bigger.
Future Trends - Meatless
7) The race to make a lab-grown steak [LINK]
The good news is that a growing number of people now seem to be rethinking what they eat. A recent report from Nielsen found that sales of plant-based foods intended to replace animal products were up 20% in 2018 compared with a year earlier. Veganism, which eschews not just meat but products that come from greenhouse-gas-emitting dairy livestock too, is now considered relatively mainstream.
Business Blogs
8) When Algorithms Make Managers Worse [LINK]
One of the newest dilemmas for leaders in an age of AI is when and how to use algorithms to manage people and teams. AI, algorithms, and automation might allow you to manage more people at scale, but that doesn’t mean they will make you a better leader. In fact, quite the opposite may be true: technology has the potential to bring out the very worst in us.
Without careful consideration, the algorithmic workplace of the future may end up as a data-driven dystopia. There are a million ways that algorithms in the hands of bad managers could do more harm than good: How about using an algorithm to set your work rosters so that the number of hours is just below the legal threshold for full-time employment? Or automatically sending emails to people when they are more than five minutes late to work? Or nudging people to work during the time they normally spend with their families by offering incentives? Or using sensors to monitor warehouse workers and then warning them when they take too long to stack a shelf? Or constantly adjusting the color temperature of your office lighting so that your employee’s circadian system thinks that late afternoon is still morning?
9) Facebook almost missed the mobile revolution. It can’t afford to miss the next big thing. [LINK]
Facebook’s core social network isn’t going away anytime soon, but there’s a good chance — probably a great chance — that the way you use Facebook’s products in 10 years will look and feel very different from the way you use them today. The device you use it on? That may change too.
10) Silicon Valley is awash in Chinese and Saudi cash [LINK]
It may look to the outside eye that Silicon Valley just prints money, funneled through startups to give you things like cheap Uber rides. But if you trace the money that comes into startups through their venture capital firms — and trace the money that comes into those venture capital firms from their so-called limited partners — one can see the makings of a great gold rush, financed by overseas investors eager to overstuff money into hungry young companies.
Tech Blogs
11) Strong Opinions Loosely Held Might be the Worst Idea in Tech [LINK]
The idea of strong opinions, loosely held is that you can make bombastic statements, and everyone should implicitly assume that you’ll happily change your mind in a heartbeat if new data suggests you are wrong. It is supposed to lead to a collegial, competitive environment in which ideas get a vigorous defense, the best of them survive, and no-one gets their feelings hurt in the process
12) Nothing Fails Like Success [LINK]
Primarily it is because these businesses have no business model. They were made and given away free. Now investors come along who can pay the founders, buy them an office, give them the money to staff up, and even help with PR and advertising to help them grow faster.
Now there are salaries and insurance and taxes and office space and travel and lecture tours and sales booths at SXSW, but there is still no charge for the product.
And the investor seeks a big return.
And when the initial investment is no longer enough to get the free-product company to scale to the big leagues, that’s when the really big investors come in with the really big bucks. And the company is suddenly famous overnight, and “everybody” is using the product, and it’s still free, and the investors are still expecting a giant payday.
Like I said—a house you can’t afford, so you go into debt to the bank and the Mob.
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In general, I post articles that I think would provide evergreen learning. In other words, the focus is on learning rather than "keeping up" with every possible news source
I love talking about technology, product, growth, technology trends, and strategy. I read a lot of stuff from a variety of places every week and these are the 12 most interesting things I’ve read or learned about this week. I aim to publish every Wednesday. If you’d like to connect in person send me a note via LinkedIn