strategy+business: “You need to [first] understand the company’s culture—the identity of the organization. A lot of CEOs think they have this understanding, but that’s often at a high level, based on impressions and anecdotes (and of course, CEOs don’t always get the full and unfiltered view). Even when companies conduct formal research, they tend to focus on employee engagement, asking whether employees are happy coming to work, whether their jobs are fulfilling, or whether they’d recommend the company to a friend. Those methods have value, but they answer a different question: whether employees feel positively or negatively about various aspects of their workplace experience. They don’t identify what the culture actually is. To fully understand a company’s culture, you need to go beyond those sentiments. That requires a comprehensive survey of the organization, one that looks at more than just employee engagement. Questions need to be structured to accurately define the dominant traits of an organization and how they might impact its ability to deliver on its strategic goals, as well as the workplace experience it offers to employees. It’s a challenging task, because culture—the unwritten rules for how a company functions on a day-to-day basis—is often invisible.”
Washington Post: “TikTok starts studying its users from the moment they first open the app. It shows them a single, full-screen, infinitely looping video, then gauges how they react: a second of viewing or hesitation indicates interest; a swipe suggests a desire for something else. With every data point, TikTok’s algorithm narrows from a shapeless mass of content to a refined, irresistible feed. It is the ultimate video channel, and this is its one program. The “For You” algorithm, as TikTok calls it, gradually builds profiles of users’ tastes not from what they choose but how they behave. While Facebook and other social networks rely on their users to define themselves by typing in their interests or following famous people, TikTok watches and learns, tapping into trends and desires their users might not identify. The system runs on a sophisticated machine-learning engine — ByteDance researchers have championed its “sub-linear computational complexity” — but to TikTokers, the process could not be simpler. Launch the app. See the video. Passively consume.”
Kenneth Rogoff: “In chess, when a player makes a mistake, they’re much more likely to make another mistake in their next move. People lose their nerve — this is a very human tendency but I worry that’s what we’re seeing with central banks today. They induced too much stimulus, remained unaware as inflation rose and now, they’re panicked and rushing in the other direction. We can’t follow one mistake with another — we need to overlook the past to focus calmly on the situation now.”
Benjamin Reinhardt: “If we draw the thread of ergophilia out into the future, we can build a world where energy too cheap to meter unlocks technology that is indistinguishable from magic. Chunky, fixable technology unconstrained by the need to make everything as efficient as possible. A return to the belief that our children will have better lives than our own. Airships sailing the sky, hypersonic craft skipping along the atmosphere, and ion-belching behemoths plying the stars. Fusionpunk…The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it’s almost free.”
