Category: Strategy

  • 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…

  • Keyword: Persuasion

    People decide with their hearts and justify with their heads. Knowing what to do with that can make you a more effective communicator. Also, a persuasion lesson from my old boss, Rick Parkhill. The word “persuasion” gets a bad rap because it sounds like a con job where the persuader pulls one over on an…

  • Retro Futures: “Redcrosse” and the view from 1997 and 2011 – Bonus

    Yesterday, April 27, 2023 was when the plot of my 2011 near future dystopian novel began… what a weird feeling. I’ve written before about Retro Futures, by which I mean looking at how the future looked to science fiction writers in previous eras, measuring what they got right and what they got wrong, and then thinking…

  • Why You Should Read “Chokepoint Capitalism”

    A new book explains how we got to our age of giant culture companies shaking down artists, why it matters to the rest of us, and what we can do about it. It baffles me that Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow’s book Chokepoint Capitalism isn’t on top of The New York Times bestseller list. It’s an important book…

  • Adventures in Self-Disruption

    Apple is preparing to cannibalize its most profitable product, the iPhone. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. Remember the Newton? This week in The New York Times, we learned about uncharacteristic debate in the executive ranks at Apple around the long-awaited Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that the company will release in June. Some execs worry that there is…

  • The Start of the English Major

    In the A.I. revolution, figuring out the contours of our human intelligence has never been more important. Who is best equipped to do this work? I give keynote addresses all over the planet about digital transformation and sharpest-edged technology trends. One of my themes is that anything that can be digital will be digital. The counterintuitive corollary to this is that…

  • 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…

  • Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

    What makes people believe nonsense for which there is no evidence? As I first wrote a year ago, you can see the elements of persuasion in this simple quadrant: Mostly, people decide with their hearts and then justify with their heads. They’re also more keen to avoid loss than to pursue gain. Knowing where your argument…

  • Retro Futures: “Looker” (1981), Looking Back, Looking Forward

    42 years ago, a murder mystery predicted digital twins and deep fakes: what did this howlingly bad movie get right and wrong? Writing science fiction is a what if? exercise that tells us a lot about the moment when the writer first posed the question. Looking at where those predictions went awry can help us to understand…

  • Why Amazon Blew it Killing “Smile”

    The country’s largest ecommerce company ended a program that donated 0.5% of eligible purchases to charities customers selected. This might have surprising negative consequences for Amazon’s brand. This week, Amazon announced that it was ending its “AmazonSmile” program that enabled customers to support charities with most purchases. The program will end on February 20th. I…