Today, a little sports math. The current reigning NBA champion Boston Celtics, owner of a dominant 61-21 record in the regular season, are in a second-round playoff series against the 51-31 New York Knicks. The Celtics were heavily favored to win this series, in part because they won four decisive games against the Knicks during…
A LinkedIn connection of mine recently reposted a story about Sonya Curry, the mother of the extremely talented NBA player Steph Curry. I clicked through to the original post, which had been posted by a lawyer who runs a foundation and is a visiting fellow at a major university — let’s call her “Mary” (not…
I strongly recommend that you take a look at Eric Schwartzman’s new article in Fast Company, “Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment.” Schwartzman’s deeply researched piece explains how malign actors are using banks of actual mobile phones, spoofed to appear as actual independent people, to manipulate sentiment about everything from actions in…
I was startled to read this quote in The Athletic (part of the New York Times) from a federal judge overseeing an antitrust case regarding the NCAA and college sports conferences: [U.S. District Court Judge Claudia] Wilken raised several questions related to the objections, but she also expressed optimism for eventual approval if those questions…
Newsletter 86: Insisting on crediting idea creators, AI can’t cite articles properly, a new business hybrid publisher, plus three people to follow and three books to read. Fight the rip-off culture I recently accepted a job to write a book chapter. The clients were expert business thinkers. The topic was a business discipline that should…
Bear with me for a little thought experiment. When a script in Hollywood appears to be lacking something crucial and the existing writers have exhausted all their creative solutions, the producer or director will sometimes bring in a “script doctor.” The script doctor is a writer who parachutes in and, based on their expert knowledge…
Let’s get this out of the way first. I know practically nothing about ice hockey. I’ve never seen a whole game live or on TV. I’m sure you hockey fans will educate me in the comments. In case you haven’t heard, something unusual happened in Saturday’s US versus Canada game of the NHL’s 4 Nations…
Few people, when deciding to work on a business book, recognize what they are really creating. A book is not just an idea made real and and powerful. It’s not just a way to spread influence and generate business. It’s a database that you can mine to power much of your work moving forward. How…
The Kansas City Chiefs weren’t the only group of people who made astoundingly bad choices in the Super Bowl. Add these folks to your list of villains: the rapper Ye (formerly called Kanye West), who hawked swastika T-shirts, and Guy Bar and Ori Bejerano of the Israeli ad agency BBDO, who appropriated celebrity images to…