Hey, how y’all doin? Hope life is good. Been really busy. Then things calmed a little. Which turned to panic. I mean, it never ends does it. Anyhoo, onwards and upwards.
"I think we consider too much the good luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
culture // dolphins
How should we work, now we’ve had this time to think about it? A recent survey found employee productivity was 71% higher when meetings were reduced by 40%. It also found that newly promoted managers schedule almost 1/3 more meetings than their experienced counterparts. Meetings for meetings sake. Cut it out. And, interestingly, other research found that since March 2020, meeting time has increased 250%, the average workday has expanded by an hour and after-hours work has increased by 30%. We need to be being more dolphin than whale. Dolphins can only take a small amount of air so surface frequently but quickly. Whales meanwhile inhale greatly, stay down longer and surface for f’in ages. Keep in touch like dolphins 🐬.
brands // signals
When Bob Hoffman talks about brands, it's usually good value. Here he makes the point that fame is EVERYTHING for brand success. Marketers, he says, underestimate the critical role that non-logical attributes like fame, play in driving differentiation and positioning. Which is fair. Marketing folk can be overly sensitive and can over think. In fact they’re twice as likely to notice ads than the public. But people are crazy and we rarely know why we do the things we do. Or choose the brands we choose. Like, we're constantly signalling and counter signalling to each other about all sort of things, including status. Middle class people, who are more status anxious, pay more attention to how they speak. While the upper class people can counter signal by being more relaxed in their speech patterns. And often, we signal by not signalling at all. We’re mad really aren’t we?
technology // unbundling
Ben Evans wrote a piece about the unbundling of advertising. How Amazon’s advertising business is now bigger than YouTube and the transformational impact the rise of “merchant media” (like Amazon) is having on advertising. As a % of the US GDP it has shrunk by 1/3, as ad budgets continue to be redistributed in search of more immediate ROI. Meanwhile new players like Disney and Netflix are looking at new opportunities for ads. Ben Thompson wrote about how Netflix, in their race for profit, might view ads as a good option. As more content shifts from linear TV and entertainment continues to open up, content becomes incredibly competitive. Attention on the other hand, is valuable and can be sold very profitably. Others, like Wall Street aren’t so sure. Change is inevitable, but as Bowie said “tomorrow belongs to those that can hear it coming”.
creativity // multidisciplinary thinking
Creativity benefits from diversity, and diversity benefits from multidisciplinary thinking. Good ideas can often transcend disciplines and have universal application. And that can be great creative stimulus. This piece on Paul Kaufman, the CEO of Glenair, describes his formula for living your best life that he discovered from lots of multidisciplinary thinking. In it, he outlines two big ideas. Both simple. Both really profound. The first is Mirrored Reciprocation (go positive and go first) and the second is Compound Interest (being constant). Both are great but together, exceptional.
five random-ish things:
And the Oscar goes to… the TikTok everything bagel 🏆.
Daisugi, the Japanese technique of growing trees in trees 🌲.
Hopefulness vs cynicism from Nick Cave, lovely words ❤️.
The age of the introvert is here 🤫 .
Apple’s Johnny Ive on focus focus focus 🎯.
watching // changing world order
Everything’s changing, everything’s not. Ray Dalio describes the principles of dealing with an increasing amount of change in world order, by looking to the past and following repeating trends. Good stuff this……