I’m currently writing some serious business content for a company that has many, many PowerPoint presentations about its ideas. I want to be clear here. This is not a complaint. The ideas are good. The slides are good. And I am certain that the people delivering the presentations were effective in persuading their audiences about…
Thousands of travelers with Southwest Airlines reservations are stranded and unable to get where they are going (or to return home). While weather delays initially caused this problem, Southwest’s own inadequate systems made recovery slow and infuriating. It took many days for the company to finally position itself to make things right. Let’s take a…
When are you most productive as a writer? I’m best from about 8 to 11 am, or 1 to 4 pm. If I’m writing something important, I try to time it for those periods, when my blood sugar and writing flow are typically at their best, and when I can block out distractions and concentrate….
Since taking over Twitter, Elon Musk has done nearly everything wrong, destroying tens of billions of dollars in value in a few short weeks. Last night he conducted a binding Twitter poll to see if he should step down, and received a resounding vote of no confidence. What can leaders learn from Musk’s short and…
Disruptive innovation requires viewing the world differently from conventional wisdom. Disruptors who succeed manage to change the conventional wisdom. Disruptors who fail end up victims of the conventional wisdom. And that includes the conventional wisdom inherent in government regulation Disruptors who ignored the rules YouTube was built on pirated, copyrighted content. It violated rules and…
Things break on the internet. The question is: is there anyone left to fix them? And how much of the resulting friction causes people to leave you for a competitor? Friction, like entropy, is ever-increasing Code is forever. It should keep working. But it requires maintenance. Why? Because it does not exist in a vacuum….
I want to share a personal experience I had as an analyst, working with a near-bankrupt company. The completely indifference to what things cost startled me — at least until I realized what was really going on. And there are, surprisingly, lessons in this for what’s happening now at Twitter. How a near-bankrupt company paid…
I skewered the email Elon Musk sent as he laid off half of Twitter. Now Mark Zuckerberg has dumped 11,000 Meta employees, 13% of the workforce. Zuck did it right, including clarity about options for laid off employees and taking responsibility for making an error. To be clear, Meta’s management made a serious error in…
People who hire freelancers should understand that this is a partnership. What does that mean? If you want us to go fast, you need to respond to our work quickly, and pay quickly. If you want consistency, it helps if your feedback is consistent. If multiple people provide contradictory feedback, it helps if you can…