HBR: “Sustaining profitable growth requires a delicate balance between the pursuit of market opportunities (demand) and the creation of the capabilities and capacity needed to exploit those opportunities (supply). To proactively manage that balance, companies need a growth strategy that explicitly addresses three interrelated decisions: how fast to grow (the target rate of growth); where to seek new sources of demand (the direction of growth); and how to amass the financial, human, and organizational resources needed to grow (the method of growth). Each of those decisions involves trade-offs that must be considered in concert with a company’s overall business strategy, its capabilities and culture, and external market dynamics.” More: “Our research—which includes interviews and case studies—shows that a growth system has five components. Define a compelling customer outcome. Architect the right capabilities. Create the right operating model. Renew insights continuously. Measure return and reallocate investment.”
Rachel Kadish: ““Write down a phrase you find abhorrent — something you yourself would never say.” My students looked startled but they cooperated. They knew I wouldn’t collect this exercise — what they wrote would be private unless they chose to share it. All that was required of them was participation. In silence they jotted a few words. So far, so good. We hadn’t yet reached the hard request: spend 10 minutes writing a monologue in the first person that’s spoken by a fictitious character who makes the upsetting statement. This portion typically elicits nervous glances. When that happens I remind students that their statement doesn’t represent them and that speaking as if they’re someone else is a basic skill of fiction writers. The troubling statement, I explain, must appear in the monologue and it shouldn’t be minimized, nor should students feel the need to forgive or account for it. What’s required is simply that somewhere in the monologue there be an instant — even a fleeting phrase — in which we can feel empathy for the speaker.”
NYTimes: “What do we gain by eating with our hands? The sense of touch can be a crucial part of dining, one thing that some cultures have understood better than others.”
Fletcher Previn: “The way we think about it is AI as a force multiplier for human potential. If I take something like software development, historically, you would say software developer is the one job that AI’s never going to be able to replace. But it turns out AI is pretty good at helping developers write full code snippets very efficiently. It’s an evolution, and we’re slightly early in that curve. At a high level, programmers are accepting below 50% of code suggestions that the AI makes. People want to make sure that human beings are reviewing this code, and there may be skepticism on the part of some software developers. But acceptance is increasing. It was 19% when we first rolled it out.”
New Yorker: ““Publishers, brace yourselves—it’s going to be a wild ride,” Matthew Goldstein, a media consultant, wrote in a January newsletter. “I see a potential extinction-level event in the future.” Some of the forces cited by Goldstein were already well known: consumers are burned out by the news, and social-media sites have moved away from promoting news articles. But Goldstein also pointed to Google’s rollout of A.I.-integrated search, which answers user queries within the Google interface, rather than referring them to outside Web sites, as a major factor in this coming extinction. According to a recent Wall Street Journal analysis, Google generates close to forty per cent of traffic across digital media. Brands with strong home-page traffic will likely be less affected, Goldstein wrote—places like Yahoo, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Daily Mail, CNN, the Washington Post, and Fox News. But Web sites that aren’t as frequently typed into browsers need to “contemplate drastic measures, possibly halving their brand portfolios.” What will emerge in the wake of mass extinction, Brian Morrissey, another media analyst, recently wrote in his newsletter, “The Rebooting,” is “a different industry, leaner and diminished, often serving as a front operation to other businesses,” such as events, e-commerce, and sponsored content. In fact, he told me, what we are witnessing is nothing less than the end of the mass-media era. “This is a delayed reaction to the commercial Internet itself,” he said. “I don’t know if anything could have been done differently.””
