Economist: “The sort of social networking that Facebook pioneered is disappearing. The most obvious change is the shift to video on today’s networks. The explosive success of TikTok, a Chinese-owned short-video app which launched in 2017 and quickly had young people hooked, has sparked a wave of copycats…The bigger change to social feeds is under the bonnet. At first, social networks showed chronological updates from users’ contacts: their friend just got engaged, their uncle was storming the Capitol and so on. As the volume of posts grew, the networks employed algorithms to prioritise posts that had proved popular among the user’s friends. Now a new phase has begun. TikTok decided that, rather than guessing what people would like based on their “social graph”—that is, what their family and friends liked—it would use their “interest graph”, which it inferred from the videos they and people like them lingered on. And rather than show content created by people they followed, it would serve up anything it thought they might like…Social media are more popular than ever, but social networks are dying.” More: “The striking feature of the new social media is that they are no longer very social. Inspired by TikTok, apps like Facebook increasingly serve a diet of clips selected by artificial intelligence according to a user’s viewing behaviour, not their social connections. Meanwhile, people are posting less. The share of Americans who say they enjoy documenting their life online has fallen from 40% to 28% since 2020. Debate is moving to closed platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram.”
WSJ: “When it’s time to pick a new chief executive officer, boards often wrestle with whether to select an insider who already knows the company’s challenges or an outsider who can shake things up. The paper’s author, Tingyu Du, a Ph.D. student at UCLA Anderson School of Business, describes CEOs promoted from subsidiaries as “hybrid CEOs” and says her research suggests these types of leaders seem to be especially effective during times of economic and/or industry turbulence. “Hybrid CEOs perform better than insiders or outsiders because, on the one hand, they are knowledgeable about the company culture and capabilities, and on the other hand, they have an outsider mindset, being more open to new ideas, and they haven’t been part of the head office,” she says.”
FT: “Professors Huggy Rao and Bob Sutton realised they were on to something when executives in their management and innovation classes at Stanford University began to offer vivid descriptions of the obstacles standing in the way of their work. “I work in a frustration factory,” said one who had enrolled in their latest course. Another, from a California technology company, was more blunt. “Professor, I’m swimming in a sea of shit. I’ve barely got my head above the water. And you want me to show initiative? How is that possible?” Once Sutton and Rao had unleashed the exasperation of staff entangled in red tape, worn down by petty rules and procedures, and held back by nitpicking managers and indecisive leaders, it was hard to stop them. Employees talked about “death by meeting,” “the tower of no”, “blowhard bosses” and “leadership by gobbledegook”. The duo, who together have devoted more than 70 years to teaching and studying organisational behaviour, started to collate and categorise the evidence of this frustration. Seven years later, they have distilled it into a new book, The Friction Project.”
WSJ: “Few of us start the day without a to-do list, but they can hurt as much as they help. For every item checked off, another hits an unexpected obstacle and two more tasks get added. By the end of the day, our to-do list is often longer than it was in the morning, deflating any sense of progress. Taking the opposite tack—a “done” list—can give you that burst of motivation that to-do lists sometimes fail to inspire, die-hard practitioners say. Instead of obsessing over what you still have to do, take an inventory of everything you’ve already done. The idea is to recognize small wins, no matter how mundane. Together, they can add up to a greater sense of achievement, says Gretchen Rubin, who has written books about happiness and forming good habits.”
