Posted on

The man who gave us brainstorming meetings did his best thinking alone

https://qz.com/work/1675944/the-man-who-invented-brainstorming-did-his-creative-thinking-alone/

Some companies have a serious addiction to brainstorming. Whenever a problem arises, the team is called to gather and shout out possible solutions, with at least one notetaker scrambling to get everything down. It’s as if this were the only known way out of a pickle, or into a new project—and it can feel like a supreme waste of time, especially when the same few dominating personalities ruin the mood.

Yet the value of brainstorming is rarely questioned. (A notable exception is a 2012 New Yorker story arguing that research cannot scientifically validate the effectiveness of the process, but even that did little to get in the way of the ubiquity of brainstorming.) Perhaps that’s because the idea of brainstorming seemingly has always existed; it’s as much a part of workplace culture as pizza parties or sales reports.

Continue reading “The man who gave us brainstorming meetings did his best thinking alone”
Posted on

Why you should never tell the boss you have food poisoning

by Sarah Todd via Quartz

Whenever I have to stay home sick from work, I’m always uncertain about how much detail to give. Do I let my boss know that I have the stomach flu, specifically? Or would she prefer the simple elegance of “feeling under the weather?”

I mentioned this conundrum at a recent dinner with three friends, all of whom are managers. For the most part, they agreed they would not want to know the particulars of an employee’s reasons for missing work. They trust the people they manage and are troubled by the idea that workers would feel pressured to disclose the minutiae of their bodily ailments. The exception, they said, is when an employee has a chronic illness or condition, in which case it’s helpful to have a bit of context for regular absences.

Continue reading “Why you should never tell the boss you have food poisoning”
Posted on

你可能不知道的咖啡价值链

http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001083133?full=y&ccode=2G192004&exclusive

咖啡为什么这么贵？为什么咖啡种植者会在咖啡日益流行的时候陷入困境？谁拿走了咖啡价值链中最大的利润？

考虑到消费者喝的咖啡比以往任何时候都要多，当下应该是种植者的好年景。然而，由于领先生产国巴西的咖啡豆大量涌入市场，阿拉比卡咖啡豆（两种主要咖啡豆中的一种，品质较高，口感较为柔和）在纽约洲际交易所(ICE)的价格仅略高于1美元/磅，远低于五年前价格的一半。

Posted on

What Buddhism Taught Me About Product Management

https://medium.com/swlh/what-buddhism-taught-me-about-product-management-f05c7486649c

Taken at one of my all-time favorite Airbnb’s in Joshua Tree

The Buddha would have made an excellent product manager 🤩️. He was obsessed with solving people’s problems, he summarized his ideas into handy lists, and he developed simple frameworks for achieving his vision. He was also one of the earliest practitioners of working from first principles, famously sitting under a Bodhi tree for forty nine days straight in order to “see things as they truly were.” 🧘‍♂️

Continue reading “What Buddhism Taught Me About Product Management”
Posted on

Aggregators and trust

TL;DR:

  • The ability to match demand and supply (allowing for mutual discoverability) thanks to their ownership of demand is only one of the two advantages of aggregators, the other being the ability to allow counterparts who do not know each other to transact with each other.
  • In the markets where the supply of aggregators operate, centralization was caused by the demand using popularity of suppliers as a proxy for their trustworthiness.
  • As a consequence of the fact that aggregators can provide the otherwise missing trust element between a customer and a product or service provider who do not know each other, and thus popularity becomes a negligible factor in the users’ choice of a provider, the distribution of profits in markets in which the supply of aggregators operate flattens over time, whereas the market at the above layer (the aggregators’) centralizes.
  • The importance of the trust element opens up the possibility of a new threat to aggregators: whereas their self-reinforcing dominant position on the match-making side is hard to be disrupted, this isn’t true for their position on the trust-enablers one. In particular, the share of their profits that come from replacing costs to act in trust-less environments is open for disruption from any new entrant with an innovative trust-minimization technology, such as dry technologies.
Continue reading “Aggregators and trust”
Posted on

The London Stock Exchange is one of the best-performing financial stocks since the Brexit vote

https://qz.com/1571049/london-stock-exchange-group-is-best-performing-big-financial-stock-since-brexit-vote/

Britain’s decision to leave the EU risks damaging the UK economy, especially its vital financial sector. But surprisingly, one of the best-performing European financial stocks since the Brexit referendum in June 2016 is a pillar of the UK’s financial sector: the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG).

Continue reading “The London Stock Exchange is one of the best-performing financial stocks since the Brexit vote”