ben damiano 7/9/23 ben damiano 7/9/23

Every Second Counts.

What is your purpose?

Is it too late to re-invent yourself?

What happens when you come to a fork in the road?

How do you motivate a team?

What does it mean to care and to have high personal standards?

A perspective on all these topics is shared in 30 minutes of some of the finest television you will ever see. It is the 7th episode of the Second Season of The Bear. (Link to see it free in North America or with a VPN at the end of the post.)

What is amazing about these 30 minutes is that you can watch it without knowing anything about any of the previous episodes or even the premise of the show except that the character Ritchie who is featured in this episode is at loose ends, estranged from his wife, trying to find his purpose at work and worried he has run out of time. His cousin who is starting a new restaurant sends him to train at three star restaurant.

I believe every CEO or team leader should screen this episode for their teams because it is about all the things that are key to successful companies and teams but delivered in a way that is amazingly impactful.

And it is also about life, the passing of time, second chances and the realization that what makes moments special is that many things every day will never happen again and there is the extra-ordinary in the ordinary day.

The episode reminds us that for great work and great teams and a great life one needs:

1. High Standards

The importance of craft, caring and operating at the highest level every day.

How sweating the details and repeated practice is key to great craftsmanship.

Why the best teams perform every day as if they are in the Super Bowl.

2. Respect

The importance of respecting others and having self respect.

“I just need you to respect me. I need you to respect the staff. I need you to respect the diners. And I need you to respect yourself.”

3. Leadership and Communication

The great Duke basketball Coach K’s talk on leadership and teams is integrated into the story where he says:

“Be on a team. Surround yourself with great people. Learn how to Listen. Converse. Don’t make excuses. Figure out a solution. You do not have to figure it out yourself. You are part of a team.”

But one sees teamwork and communication as every person plays off each other in a restaurant from front of the house to back of the house.

You can see it below ( Click on the link to see it on YouTube since it cannot be embedded here)

4. The importance of customer focus, customer delight, and customer intelligence.

We often read about why one should know each customer and customize solutions for them.

There is a five minute segment in this show that illustrates and teaches more about these topics than dozens of powerpoint decks.

There is even an example where someone outsources from a competitor to keep a Client delighted. ( Deep Dish pizza is part of this story that is all I will say).

5. Why time is all we have and we need to believe in others and our selves and never give up .

There is a five minute scene which is probably some of the most moving television ever created as the Chef of the restaurant speaks about her challenges and journals she discovered from her father… it is a cameo from the Oscar Winner Olivia Colman…

She discussed her setbacks and how she resurrected herself.

She talks about discovering her fathers journals and letters after he where he wrote down everything he saw or noticed.

She notes he seemed to be saying..

Do not forget this moment.

Do not forget this interesting strange detail.

She ends by

And he’d sign of each letter the same way….(and then she gets called away and Richie figures out how her father signed off…)

You can watch a bit of it here or the twitter link below and it will leave you different…

https://twitter.com/i/status/1673153448680869889

And here is one piece among many of how amazing these five minutes are: Five minutes of greatness: https://decider.com/2023/06/29/the-bear-olivia-colman-cameo-season-2-episode-7-forks-guest-stars/

6. Integration of flow and craftsmanship.

In the two minutes below one sees the level of craftsmanship from writing to photography to music ( yes Taylor Swift also is incorporated into the story), a sense of place ( the show is a love story to my hometown Chicago) and much more. This episode of The Bear is not just about purpose, time, teamwork, craftsmanship and flow but it is a product of these inputs.

And if you want to know how they made everything look so real…well they shot it in a Michelin starred restaurant of course: The Real Restaurant: Ever…https://www.theringer.com/tv/2023/7/5/23783009/the-bear-season-2-episode-7-forks-richie-stages-ever-restaurant

Hope you take the 30 minutes to watch the entire episode.

It might be the best uses of your time.

Here is where you can watch The Bear for free (all episodes are terrific but this post is about Episode 7 of Season 2 which is called “Forks” and is probably among the best). Outside the US please use a VPN. Hulu has some of the most amazing television from “The Old Man” to “Atlanta” and you may want to stick around after the free trial ( more great stuff here than majority owner Disney’s property Disney+ which is basically a Star Wars and Avengers franchise with a sprinkle of Pixar and a dash of Simpsons. Which is why Bob Iger has come around to the fact he needs it not just because Comcast can force him to buy the rest from them)

ben damiano 7/2/23 ben damiano 7/2/23

Remaining Relevant in an AI Age.

The history of AI is over 80 years old.

You can learn and view its developments here at the online Computer History Museum site.

After many ups and downs, false dawns and surviving many winters AI or what Ted Chiang, the author calls “Applied Statistics” has arrived due to a combination of access to swaths of training data available on the Internet, massive increases in computing power and several breakthroughs in neural network design.

Today a combination of daily breakthroughs and exponential improvements combined with tens of billions of dollars of capital means that every company, every job and every one of us will be impacted by AI.

How do individuals and firms adapt and thrive in what clearly will be a new landscape?

3 steps.

1) Embrace. 2) Adapt. 3) Complement.

Embrace

It’s 1977 and a new movie titled Star Wars: A New Hope is released and in it a General Dodonna ends a briefing to his fighters (which includes Luke Skywalker) with the words “May the Force Be With You” (watch this scene from what is now nearly five decades ago not just for the line but how far film making technology has advanced and hear the line first time it was said…it was not Obi-Won Kenobi or Yoda.)

It's 1599 and somewhere in England a play by William Shakespeare is staged during which the following lines are spoken (listen to them voiced by John Gieguld to understand why Shakespeare is best heard and not just read):

"We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures."

Both Shakespeare over 500 years ago and George Lucas 50 years ago shared the first rules of thriving in changing times.

Align with the force.

Go with the flow.

Every individual and organization should and must spend time learning and understanding this new tsunami.

It is real. It is powerful and it is moving extremely fast.

Yes, there are lots of issues from copyright to impact on employment to a terminator like bot getting all of humanity, but the genie is out of the bottle, there is no going back or time for individuals or organizations to dither.

As an individual it is essential to begin to understand Re-Generative AI including prompt to text (e.g., GPT-4), prompt to image (e.g., Mid Journey), prompt to audio (e.g., Voice lab) and prompt to video (e.g. Runway ML). One way to keep up daily is to subscribe and read this free daily note called Ben’s Bites.

Another good place to start experiment with prompt to text is here at Pi (Inflection AI a one-year-old company which powers Pi this week raised 1.3 billion dollars from Microsoft and Nvidia among others.)

Adapt

Organizations need to re-think and re-visit every aspect of their products and services to see where productivity can be enhanced, product and services augmented, and completely new innovations launched.

And it is not as simple as automating and speeding up things as we have learned from a lawyer using AI to help in a legal case only to find that the AI had made things up (and increasingly this will be a huge issue) but a far deeper re-architecting of the business versus just a re-skinning or a re-structuring to cut costs.

The three big questions are:

a) What can be AI enhanced and what should not?

b) How will the AI product be built/trained and what quality control will ensure that the result is safe and legal among other things?

c) How will the organizational design and talent allocation change to incorporate these new capabilities?

For most companies there is good chance that AI technology itself will become a commodity like ingredient.

In fact, smaller companies (outside of the mega cap tech companies that are funding and driving AI investments) are likely to benefit more from AI since it will now make amazing capabilities affordable to everybody.

Size maybe less of a competitive advantage.

Well thought out processes for yesterday may become anchors to change.

And even senior management who cannot adapt fast (AI is scaling so quickly it is wishful thinking for senior folks to believe one can delay things till retirement) will become a competitive disadvantage.

But a key to adaptation will be how to attract and retain talent to work in new ways to complement the AI.

Because the future will not be just an AI age but an HI age

HI= Human Inspired.

Complement

Successful individuals and companies will complement the power of computing machines and software.

They will do this by enhancing, training, and bending what the technology can enable with creativity, storytelling, empathy, provenance, humanity, insight and imagination.

There will be a premium on building and attracting talent who are strong in the 6 C’s.

Three of these have to do with individual competence (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).

Cognition is simply learning to think and keeping our mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable and essential in a world where the computing operating systems are constantly improving.

Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will.

To be human is to be creative.

Creativity is at its heart the way we deal with a world of change by adapting, evolving, and re-inventing.

We need to learn and feed this inside us. The future will be about data driven storytelling and not just data or storytelling and the ability to leverage modern machines and algorithms to unleash connection and meaning will depend on creativity.

Curiosity is simply being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking what if? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it.

Being cognitively gifted, creative, and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages is how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. For these we need to hone and build and train for three other skills which are key since a great part of Human Inspired work is not just how to work alongside the machine but work alongside other humans.

Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software/hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.

Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned. One can use GPT to write the first draft and have Mid-Journey come up with great visuals for presentations and use other AI tools to provide amazing starter ideas and be a great co-pilot but Human Inspired means taking these outputs to the next level and requires communication skills.

But communication is not a one-way street and as important as it to write, speak and present it is as critical to be able to listen, to hear and to understand what others are saying with an open mind and a sense of empathy since this will also be a differentiating advantage in an AI age.

Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We must convince colleagues of our points of view.

We all must learn to convince and learn to sell often finding ways to sell something different than what the machines may recommend.

Time has proven that technology while bringing with it risks and downsides over time is a massive positive force for humanity.

The future is bright and all we must do is open our eyes, heart and minds and seize the benefits of this amazing era.

ben damiano 6/25/23 ben damiano 6/25/23

How to Think.

The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a fantastic overview of photography which is based on an exhibition curated by him for MOMA in 1964.

The book selects photographs from the entire history of photography up to 1964 both by famous photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston but also work by amateurs to illustrate challenges and opportunities faced by photographers.

Szarkowski identifies five keys to see like a photographer: 1) The Thing Itself, 2) The Detail, 3) The Frame, 4) Time and 5) Vantage Point.

Each one of these five are also great tools to use to improve thinking for personal and business decisions.

Photographer Unknown

The Thing Itself

“The first thing that the photographer learned was that photography dealt with the actual; he had not only to accept this fact, but to treasure it; unless he did, photography would defeat him. He learned that the world itself is an artist of incomparable inventiveness, and that to recognize its best works and moments, to anticipate them, to clarify them and make them permanent, requires intelligence both acute and supple.”

One of the keys to proper thinking is to see the situation for what it is.

To face reality. To collect the facts. To not have FOFO ( the fear of finding out).

If we traffic in magical thinking, look away from the problem and assume away what is real it is hard to think straight.

The Detail

“The photographer was tied to the facts of things, and it was his problem to force the facts to tell the truth. He could not, outside the studio, pose the truth, he could only record it as he found it, and it was found in nature in a fragmented and unexplained form—not as a story, but as scattered and suggestive clues.”

Every challenge and opportunity lies in the details. One or two key variables that the enterprise turns on. Forgetting that interest rates could go up and that you can not lend in the long term while borrowing in the short term led to Silicon Valley Bank’s implosion.

Similarly in the sea of data lies the pattern which reveals the meaning.

In hindsight the key details and critical data are obvious. But to reveal what drives the machine and makes the clock tick we need to analyze and scenario plan.

The shifting of parameters often reveals the key variables we take for granted or need to be aware of.

Ask what key details or critical data that drive assumptions. And then think about when they change what new new risks or opportunities are created?

The Frame

“Since the photographer's picture was not conceived but selected, his subject was never truly discrete, never wholly self-contained. The edges of his film demarcated what he thought most important, but the subject he had shot was something else; it had extended in four directions. If the photographer's frame surrounded two figures, isolating them from the crowd in which they stood, it created a relationship between those two figures that had not existed before.

The central act of photography, the act of choosing and eliminating, forces a concentration on the picture edge—the line that separates in from out—and on the shapes that are created by it.”

Framing a problem is a key to solving it.

If one does not start with the right question the solution might never have a chance of being correct.

Similarly framing a situation or an offer is key to how someone looks at it.

Everything is in context with everything else and this ability to frame is an essential tool to the best problem solvers and sales people.

Time

“All photographs are time exposures of shorter or longer duration, and each describes a discrete parcel of time. This time is always the present. Uniquely in the history of pictures, a photograph describes only that period of time in which it was made. Photography alludes to the past and the future only in so far as they exist in the present, the past through its surviving relics, the future through prophecy visible in the present.”

Placing things in perspective from a past, present and future lens allow one to stress test one’s thoughts.

Scavenging the past reveals treasures for the future but stay frozen in the past and there will be not future to treasure. So it is critical to both move forward from yesterday to today as well as backward from tomorrow to today.

In addition, it reminds us that timing is key to understand when to launch a product or service.

Too soon or too late is a problem as is too slow or too fast.

A decision that can be reversed should be made fast versus one that cannot should be marinated in time.

Photographer Unknown

Vantage Point

“Much has been said about the clarity of photography, but little has been said about its obscurity. And yet it is photography that has taught us to see from the unexpected vantage point, and has shown us pictures that give the sense of the scene, while withholding its narrative meaning. Photographers from necessity choose from the options available to them, and often this means pictures from the other side of the proscenium showing the actors' backs, pictures from the bird's view, or the worm's, or pictures in which the subject is distorted by extreme foreshortening, or by none, or by an unfamiliar pattern of light, or by a seeming ambiguity of action or gesture.”

In a famous Japanese movie Rashomon truth depends on where one stands. The same crime when viewed from four vantage points lead to different conclusions as to what actually happened..

Being able to think from the perspective of a buyer if one is a seller, from a disrupter if one is a legacy company or having the empathy to understand other peoples perspective are key to clear thinking.

So next time when making a decision or evaluating a situation 1) look hard at the situation or thing itself to make sure the facts are understood, 2) parse the detail and the data, 3) frame the question or the solution, 4) interrogate it with time scenarios and 5) view it from different vantage points.

ben damiano 6/18/23 ben damiano 6/18/23

Kindness.

**Large Girl with No Eyes, Julian Schnabel**

One of the keys to a good life and possibly success at work is kindness.

This includes not just being kind to other people but kind to oneself.

Often we spend our time regretting, self-flagellating, doubting our decisions and wondering if we can ever measure up especially in a world filled with standards and measures that are unattainable.

In today’s competitive marketplace of rapidly transforming landscapes and constant benchmarking we often forget that we are dealing not just with buyers, sellers, users, members, competitors, analysts, scientists, management and employees but with analog, carbon based, feeling filled people.

Humans.

Messy and Moody. Dream filled and desire driven.. Anxiously ambitious. Undulating with uncertainty.

Kindness is a way to connect in a world where connections are key.

But it not easy to model in an Excel spreadsheet, display in a PowerPoint , or be described with any depth by GPT.

The machine will rapidly compute an answer, garland it with perspective, refine and correlate what has been fed into its innards, and then emit an output in a dazzling display of verbosity.

Answers that may awe us.

But rarely move us.

Below are three takes on kindness. From GPT-4, author George Saunders, and poet Naomi Shihab Nye.

Take 1: GPT-4 on Kindness

Prompt: What is kindness?

Kindness is a type of behavior marked by acts of generosity, consideration, or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward. It is often considered a virtue and is recognized in many cultures and religions as an important value. Kindness can manifest in many ways, including but not limited to:

Helping others: This could involve assisting someone with their work, offering to carry heavy items, or helping someone cross the street. The act doesn't have to be grand to be kind.
Complimenting or praising someone: Words of affirmation can have a huge impact on someone's day. Complimenting someone genuinely can be a simple yet effective act of kindness.
Empathy and understanding: Kindness often involves understanding other people's perspectives and feelings. This could mean listening to someone when they're having a hard time, or refraining from judgment when someone makes a mistake.
Patience: Patience, especially when dealing with difficult people or situations, can be a significant act of kindness. It involves tempering your reaction, even when you're frustrated or angry.
Charitable giving: This is another classic example of kindness. Donating to a cause you believe in, volunteering your time, or even just offering someone a meal can all be acts of kindness.
Showing respect: Treating everyone with respect, regardless of their background or beliefs, is an act of kindness. This could involve simple things like saying "please" and "thank you," or more complex acts like promoting inclusivity and fairness.

In essence, kindness involves treating others the way you'd like to be treated. It's a simple concept but can have a profound impact on the world.

Take 2: Author George Saunders on kindness

The author George Saunders gave a short and remarkable speech on the importance of kindness which everyone should listen to.

A key theme is “to err in the direction of kindness”

Some key passages of his talk to students

“When young, we’re anxious — understandably — to find out if we’ve got what it takes. Can we succeed? Can we build a viable life for ourselves? But you — in particular you, of this generation — may have noticed a certain cyclical quality to ambition. You do well in high-school, in hopes of getting into a good college, so you can do well in the good college, in the hopes of getting a good job, so you can do well in the good job so you can . . .

And this is actually O.K. If we’re going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously — as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.”

Later George was interviewed on this talk which went viral after it was posted in the New York Times on why kindness was important and here is what he said:

“Ninety-nine percent of the time if you just do your best to be kind, you’re better off. It’s the basic things, like trying to have good manners, keeping your assumptions about the other person a little open, being willing to revise your opinion.

Perhaps it’s all a self-fulfilled prophecy. We live in an unkind world because we believe it’s an unkind world.

The thing I’ve noticed is that if you go out into the world ready for confrontation, then confrontations find you. But if you go out with a sort of diffusing energy, the world reads that and feels more friendly toward you. So I think there’s a circular effect.

In the media and in our political rhetoric, we’re told don’t be a sucker, be firm, be strong, push back, they’re trying to get you. If you buy into that—even on a molecular level—the world smells it on you. Whereas—and here’s where it sounds corny—the world responds to you differently if you go out thinking, alright, I’m going to pretend that everybody out there is my brother or my sister, and if they are temporarily behaving like they’re not, I’m going to pretend that they’re just confused. I’m going to insist, through my mannerisms and my tone of voice, that I see them at their highest.”

Take 3: The poet Naomi Shihab Nye on kindness

Kindness.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

ben damiano 6/11/23 ben damiano 6/11/23

Exponential Organizations!

Earlier this week (June 6, 2023), a new book called Exponential Organizations 2.0 by Salim Ismail, Peter Diamandis and Michael Malone was made available.

Every subscriber of this thought letter regardless of whether one is employed by a firm, self-employed, unemployed or even retired is likely to benefit by reading this book.

It will stretch your mind and make you re-think a lot of things about firms and work and the future. There will be parts that may surprise you and parts that may anger you. You may nod along and occasionally fly into rage wondering if the authors have tripped into the light fantastic.

The book is filled with examples, charts, data, and graphs and step by step exercises and recommendations that you will be able to leverage as you manage your career, your team, and your firm.

You can own it and read it now on any device that supports the Kindle app for only 99 cents here

The Changing Nature of a Firm.

Ronald Coase an economist from the University of Chicago won the Nobel Prize in part for his rationale that firms exist because internal transaction costs are lower than external transaction costs.

In short, despite internal bureaucracy and red tape and processes, large firms endured because no matter how bad the internal friction it was often less than the friction of negotiating and setting up each transaction necessary to get a job done with outside parties.

But then…

In the US in the three years beginning in February 2020, small establishments—locations with fewer than 250 employees—have hired 3.67 million more people than have been laid off or who quit. Larger establishments—those with 250 employees or more—have cut a net 800,000 job (and this was before the huge layoffs at the large tech companies). That is according to data from the government’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.

A combination of enabling technologies including mobile computing, new marketplaces (Amazon Web Services, Shopify, Upwork) that allow for easy access to scaled resources through an API, a changing work force (free-lancers will outnumber full time employees next year in the US) and new mindsets (76% of Gen-Z want to be their own boss) have made Coase’s law less relevant than it was before.

Now combine the changes we have lived through in the past two decades with the disruptions of Covid-19 and the huge emerging technology platform shifts driven by AI, AR/VR, Blockchain and 5G-- all of which massively empower individuals and small agile teams-- and the nature of firms will change.

Large firms will continue to endure because in many cases scale, capital and other resources are better allocated and utilized with such structures, but these firms will increasingly work in radical new ways which include becoming flatter, faster, enabling fewer and fewer full time employees than ever before.

In 2020, the Amsterdam based banking and financial company the ING Group with over a trillion dollars of assets decided the future was going to require much more autonomous ways of working and decided to develop a transformative new model. The asked each employee to re-apply for to the company if they were interested in the new ways of working which reduced the number of mangers, removed the ability to delegate tasks that you should do to others and required constant shapeshifting. Nearly one third of the employees quit and the following year ING delivered the same results with the remaining two thirds of employees.

Many firms have begun to realize that the future does not fit in the containers of the past and most organizations may have been built for yesterday rather than the very different challenges of today and the amazing opportunities of tomorrow.

The new firm will be an Exponential Organization 2.0 which the authors define as

A purpose-driven, agile, and scalable organization that uses accelerating technologies to digitize, dematerialize, democratize, and demonetize its products and services, resulting in a 10x performance increase over its non-ExO peers.

The Key Drivers of An Exponential Organization

The chart above is a map of the terrain that forms the Exponential Organization 2.0.

It all begins with a Massive Transformational Purpose which is defined as “the core reason for the firm’s existence. It is the foundation upon which all the company actions take place. It establishes a long-term goal for the company that is so sweeping and profound that it is always within reach yet always unreachable. It sets a moral foundation for all company interactions between stakeholders. It keeps the company disciplined and on target. It inspires employees and customers. And it galvanizes employee morale and retention.”

Here are some examples of MTP’s:

Google: Organize the world’s information.

Uber: Go anywhere. Get anything.

Danone: Bring health through food.

Spanx: Elevating Women.

It is key to determine a massive transformational purpose ( MTP) for an ongoing firm and should be something every new business should figure out at launch.

The other two factors that drive new organizational design are external facing ones (SCALE) which is how the firm connects with the outside world and internal facing ones which are the key factors that the firm should run the business internally (IDEAS).

Connecting Externally: SCALE

Staff On Demand: Projects should be staffed, and work done by putting together teams of pre-qualified workers hired on a as-need basis. These individuals could be self-employed, free-lance, procured from third parties such as Upwork and other contracting , or even full-time employees who are re-aggregated around the jobs that need to be done and then dissolve post the job. Think how talent comes together in Hollywood around a tv show or project or consultants move from assignment to assignment at a Bain or McKinsey depending on their skills and the assignment.

Community and Crowd: Communities are built around users, customers, alumni as well as vendors, suppliers and fans who are aligned with the massive transformational purpose who are granted special favors, given insider insights and forward look on future offerings and rewarded with gifts and trust. While they are not employees, they are pseudo employees, citizens of the firm’s larger community. Companies like Peloton and Apple of leveraged community from key developers to super and early fans. Community is often sourced from crowds. With most of the worlds 8 billion people connected online one can leverage crowds to grow a company and find community as TikTok did in entertainment and Kiva in finance and GoFundMe in fund raising.

Algorithms and AI: Both technologies allow for massive research, fast pattern matching, massive experimentation and more and will turbo-charge talent and company design.

Leveraged Assets: Increasingly companies will be asset light using APIs to access what they need when they need it whether it be compute power, manufacturing, or distribution. Cloud based computing is a common form of a leveraged asset.

Leveraged significantly reduce the need for capital, cost of carrying inventory and risk of obsolete technology.

Engagement: Engagement is the use of techniques like gamification, incentive prizes, and recently crypto economics like NFT’ s to keep stakeholders interested, involved and increasingly committed to a shared purpose. Examples include how Reddit uses its members to vote up or down on submitted content. It’s the classic example of reciprocity Engagement: if you share content you can access content which drives engagement of community and crowd.

Connecting Internally: IDEAS

Interfaces: Interfaces are the matching and filtering processes that allow a firm to translate the abundance of data into precise and meaningful information that can be acted on. For instance Shopify has created a number of interfaces that allow its customers to access all of its SCALE attributes which is it’s community, it’s AI, it’s external and internal talent and its assets so that an individual can find an eco-system of third party functions to help them sell as well as buyers for their products and services.

Dashboards: Dashboards are the internal and external presentation of real time objectives and key results (OKR’s) a company needs to operate. These include everything from leader boards and other data for users to internal metrics to drive the firm such as monthly recurring revenue (MRR), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Life-Time Value (LTV), Margin, Churn, Net Promoter Score etc. These dashboards constantly allow a company to re-allocate resources, change marketing plans, re-price products and navigate the firm.

Experimentation: In a fast-changing world experimentation and iteration is the only way. Experimentation is a key to make data driven decisions even about innovation and creativity. By trying different approaches and A/B testing, measuring quickly, failing fast and honing and building on success a company can speed and scale rapidly.

Autonomy: Some of the biggest drawbacks of large organizations are bureaucracy where there are scores of people empowered to say no and very few who can say yes, decision makers far from the customer or the marketing battlefield and an entire ethos of giving “good meetings” and “butt covering” versus making shit happen. Autonomy challenges this via an approach characterized by self-organized, multi-disciplinary teams that operate with de-centralized authority all focusses on hitting the company OKR’s, Massive Transformational Purpose and Moonshots.

Social: Social technologies accelerate conversations and therefore learning cycles. These include communication tools like Slack, Zoom and Google Docs, collaboration tools like Asana and Jira and workflow management tools like Dropbox. There are ranges of tools from Canva a collaborative graphics tool to Miro board that allow virtual white boarding.

The Imperative of Transformation

We have entered the dawn of a new era whether one is a CEO, or an intern, a gig worker or an investor will need to twist themselves and their organization into new shapes to continue to thrive in the future.

The ability to exponentially grow is now possible for every person and firm where most external barriers, excuses and obstacles are being dissolved away and our ability to change will make us grow while staying the course will likely see us going the way of Blackberry, Kodak.

No great talent or company is defeated.

They defeat themselves.

By failing to change and adapt and re-invent.