Category: Aesthetics

  • Batman, Business, and the Incomparable

    How one Batman cartoon from 1992 demonstrates the strategic value of looking for what makes your business impossible to compare to the competition. The most important question in business isn’t “how does your offering compare to the competition?” Instead, the question to ask is “how is your offering incomparable?” What is it about your business that…

  • AI, SCOTUS, and Affirmative Action

    Colliding Trends: as the Supreme Court changed college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts argued that personal essays will be more important, but are applicants learning to write in the age of ChatGPT? When I give sharpest-edge trend keynotes, I often use the phrase “colliding trends” to describe how I approach peering into the future. As a…

  • Economist, DeSantis, Trump, Shakespeare

    The May 27th issue of The Economist has an in-depth briefing entitled, “A bungled coup: Ron DeSantis has little chance of beating Donald Trump to his party’s nomination.” The Economist is always literate, but it isn’t often literary. This piece persistently conjures up Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar throughout. That includes the opening line: “Belatedly and nervously, the would-be assassins have been…

  • The Anatomy of Delight

    A Broadway show, a YouTube video, and a classic movie lead me to explore how surprise comes from novelty on the other side of familiarity… & why that’s actionable for creators and business leaders. People call things delightful all the time, but what exactly is delight? It’s not just pleasure, nor is it simply more…

  • A Urinal in Troutdale: Shakespeare Sightings

    Shakespeare has been ever-present for centuries because of a peculiar quality of how the brand works, a quality that other brands can imitate. Here are two weird things about Shakespeare. First, while some people love Shakespeare, others view reading or seeing the plays as a punishment from God. Second, you cannot escape references to Shakespeare—not…

  • Keyword: Eventness

    Watching the series finale of “Star Trek: Picard” was a lonely exercise because most of the value of experiences comes from sharing them. Regret seldom punctuates my day-to-day life, but if I had Prof. Peabody’s Wayback Machine handy I would jump back a few days and then schlep up to Seattle or down to L.A.…

  • Analog Icebergs, Digital Oceans

    Forget ChatGPT and Bard, if you want to experience a miraculous technology try a kitchen sink. I learned this the hard way a few nights ago when our sink backed up. No kitchen sink means no convenient place to clean the dinner dishes, nowhere to wash away the bits of food waste that we can’t…

  • Attention is Not a Currency

    “Paying attention,” a common metaphor, is misleading because there are different sorts of attention, and the relationship among them isn’t reducible to numbers. If you’re in the Attention Business—and whether you’re selling movies, cars, toothpaste, whoopee cushions, sex toys, health insurance, a ride hailing service, or a new ointment for that embarrassing rash, every business is in…

  • Would Anyone Under 30 watch “Picard”?

    Like “The Mandalorian” or “Loki,” the Paramount+ series “Star Trek: Picard” is unlikely ever to attract new viewers. But is that a problem? Here’s a newsflash to no one who has met me. I’m a nerd. One piece of evidence from a vast jigsaw puzzle of nerdery: Friday night, I watched the third episode of…

  • Retro Futures: AI and Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics

    Older sci fi can help us see the difference between where we are as a culture and where we thought we’d be. A look back at Isaac Asimov’s 1940s robot stories can help us make sense of AI today. Some science fiction is a potpourri of lasers and explosions and aliens popping out, but the better sort…