Tag Archives: from:Drafts

Set your cornerstone by understanding how you’ll impact revenue, cost, or risk. These are the things that keep CEOs up at night, so that’s where you need to focus your efforts. Will the improvement help you acquire new customers (increasing revenue), deflect unnecessary support cases (lowering costs), or improve employee retention (reducing risk)? These aren’t the only examples for business case anchors, but they give a flavor of how to frame the thinking around the blueprint for your structure.

Original source: Take These Three Steps To Build Your CX Improvement Business Case

If we want to raise healthy, high-agency children, we should give them the freedom to make decisions without removing them from the consequences of those decisions. Giving children agency now will help them avoid a dark cycle of work, pain, and reckless release in the future. Even if a life of indulgent hedonism is fun in the short-term, it ultimately leaves a void in the heart.

Also, a hint of setting healthy expectations for yourself and kids, rather than being too lofty.

Original source: The Price of Discipline

[Based in studying trends from 1990 to 2007,] each additional robot added in manufacturing replaced about 3.3 workers nationally, on average…. That increased use of robots in the workplace also lowered wages by roughly 0.4 percent during the same time period.

Original source: How many jobs do robots really replace?

I travel a lot for work, which I love, but I am also prone to real bouts of homesickness. That's been true for as long as I can remember. My self-defense strategy over the years has been to make restaurants all over the world little outposts of home. People come to me sometimes for restaurant tips when they're traveling, and I think I'm pretty consistent in saying I have three favorite restaurants in the world: D'Chez Eux in Paris, Clancy's in New Orleans and Matricianella in Rome. I like pointing people to these places for the same reason I find myself returning to them: The ritual is something we can share, no matter the distance between us, and feel connected.

Original source: A letter from the great quarantine: Missing football, pasta and friendship

I mean, death is quite different from a finish line. There’s nothing after the finish line. You can’t enjoy that you won the race, so it isn’t really … life is not a game in that sense, ‘Oh now I have done the seven things that I would like.’ I mean, yes, you know, I am well aware my time is limited, but I am not sure what conclusion to draw from it.

Original source: Wallace Shawn: ‘I live off doing animal voices in cartoons’

Odell understands and acknowledges that doing nothing — by which she means taking time out of one’s day to engage in an activity without considering whether it’s productive — isn’t something that’s available to everyone. But her book is least convincing when she suggests that meaningful political change would follow if the strategies she has adopted were taken up en masse. Though she acknowledges that she’s lucky to be able to exercise the freedom to while away the hours in her favorite rose garden or to go bird-watching, Odell seems to disregard just how individualistic her strategies are. She lives an artistic life, one that lends itself wonderfully to aesthetic expression but is less useful in the political realm.

Original source: A Manifesto for Opting Out of an Internet-Dominated World

Joseph Bottum mentions Andrew Ferguson’s cocktail-party test for books—would you be embarrassed at a cocktail party for not having read it?—and notes the last such novel Ferguson cites passing this test was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities in 1987.

And:

Now that visual art has lost its import, now that poetry seems to have become an insular and thereby minor art, now that modern classical music has long been unable to command support, the entire realm of what used to be called high culture seems not so much in abeyance or even in retreat but in ashes. This high culture gave those of us enamored of it intimations of an elevated life, however far it might have been out of our reach, a life lived deeper down and beyond quotidian concerns. We can, of course, continue to live on the high culture of the past, with the great music of Austria and Germany, the painting of Italy, Holland, and France, the literature of Russia, Western Europe, and America, most of it produced a hundred and more years ago. Painful, nevertheless, is it to contemplate that further production in these magnificent lines of culture may well be closing down, and that contemporary culture henceforth will consist of streamed movies made chiefly from comic-book characters, video games, and graphic novels.

I dunno. A shift in mediums is fine. The question is: is the content still good?

Original source: What Happened to the Novel?

“Imagine a shoemaker or car mechanic making their own sign,” Riccardo says.

Original source: Dalton Maag’s Monte Stella typeface celebrates the “imperfect” post-war vernacular lettering of Milan

The best television title sequences have historically interacted with viewers and their relationship to the show on some level.

Original source: How to keep TV title sequences relevant in a post-“Skip Intro” world

So if you’re wondering when you might be most creative, you need to think about when you might be the least inhibited. That would be the time of day that you might want to schedule, or at least experiment with scheduling, some creative time. For many people, that time is usually when they’re not at their most energetic, or most productive. You don’t want to schedule creative time during your most productive time; you want to schedule it when you’re slightly less goal-oriented and sharp, when you’re on the downward slope and you’ve started to fatigue, so that you’re open to different ways of thinking and creating.

Also:

Across the board, everyone benefits from exposure to nature. This can be anything, looking out the window and seeing some greenery, or going for a walk. It definitely can’t hurt and, in my line of work, I’ve never heard of anyone saying it doesn’t help, or “this plant is really killing my creative energy!”

Original source: How to find your most creative time of day, and make it count

A deep, long recession will stoke anger, because the pandemic has held up an unflattering mirror to rich societies. Ill-run care homes for the elderly, high rates of death among minorities, the extra demands holding back working women and, especially in America, health care that is hard to reach for many, will all lead to calls for reform. So might the realisation that an unfair burden has fallen on ordinary people. Americans earning less than $20,000 a year are twice as likely to have lost their job to covid-19 as someone earning over $80,000. Much will depend on how fast they are rehired.

Original source: Life after lockdowns

The data also shows a major gap between income levels in the ability to work from home. Of people making under $50,000 a year, just 24% work at home. In the middle range, from $50,000 to $100,000, the number jumps to 36%, and for those making $100,000 or more, 46% are able to work from home.

Original source: As working from home becomes more widespread, many say they don’t want to go back

Despite the fact that he’s earning executive-level pay while wearing boardshorts, he wants to leave dropshipping behind.

Original source: ‘It’s bullshit’: Inside the weird, get-rich-quick world of dropshipping

PDF is not dead: 50% of technology purchase decision makers say they still prefer to download and read or print static articles.

Also, some broad ideas of what to do (make derivative works off central ones) and survey charts on what people find valuable.

Original source: How To Create Great B2B Marketing Thought Leadership Content

I’m never really sure what the deal with 5G is. I mean: better networking, sure. But is that such a huge deal? It feels like getting all excited about going from cast iron pipes to PVC.

Here’s some 5G background and commentary in this interview:

I don’t expect the highest 5G standards to be met until the middle of the decade, if ever, there’s a lot that has to happen before 5G delivers ultra-low latency of one millisecond. Average download downlink speeds of up to 20 gigabits per second, or handoffs at speeds as high as you know, 500 kilometers per hour. I’m just not confident those standards will be met anytime soon.

And, a tangible benefit for us consumers:

Among those promises, I think its potential to replace broadband at home or in the office could have the greatest impact. I mean, it’s just ridiculous that so many of us are still paying for at least two connectivity services today, we have our mobile plans and fixed broadband. In most cases. If mobile operators can deliver reliable broadband like speeds that will finally break the hold that cable and other internet service providers have on so many of us. I think all of us could use the savings that would provide more now than ever. Not sure we’ll get there, but I remain hopeful.

Original source: 7 Layers Interview: Matt Kapko ‘5G is easily one of the most overhyped technologies’

In the first nine months of Canonical's 2019 fiscal year, the company had $83.43-million in gross revenue with $10.85-million in profits. A closer look reveals that Canonical has been profitable since 2018.

Original source: Mark Shuttleworth on Ubuntu popularity and Canonical profitability

"The Law of Triviality states that the amount of time spent discussing an issue in an organization is inversely correlated to its actual importance in the scheme of things. Major, complex issues get the least discussion while simple, minor ones get the most discussion."

This concept as a tool is about learning how to place value in a task. Your tendency will be to solve problems that you understand, that seem easy to solve. Sometimes those are important, sometimes harder tasks are important. You have to know which outcome is better, what you want.

Of course, it goes the other way too: just because a task is difficult or confusing doesn’t mean it’s valuable.

Original source: Why We Focus on Trivial Things