Category: Strategy

  • First Thoughts on Amazon’s Echo and Alexa

    Based in large part on my friend Jeff Minsky’s enthusiast endorsement, I bought the Amazon Echo device that comes with its voice-activated, Siri-like, AI digital helper named Alexa.  “This is a no-brainer,” Jeff said.  “If nothing else it’s a terrific wireless speaker for under $200, and it does so much more.” I unboxed Echo on Wednesday,…

  • Don’t Miss Adam Grant’s new book “Originals”

    Of the many compliments that I can give to Adam Grant’s remarkable new book Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, a rare one is that I will have to read it again soon.  Grant is an unusual social scientist in that he’s also a terrific writer, a gem-cutting anecdote selector of real-life stories that illuminate…

  • Don’t Call Them “Consumers”

    What you call people matters.  It tells them what you really think about them. Here’s an example: years ago my friend Jules shared how her Mom would call for her Dad in a never-changing escalation of urgency and decline of affection: “Sweetheart!” she’d trill, followed by, “Honey?” and then ending with “Bill!!”  The equation worked…

  • Daniel Kahneman kicks my ass, or Reading Fast and Slow

    Like Moe, the schoolyard bully in Calvin & Hobbes, Daniel Kahneman has taken away my cognitive lunch money for the last four years.  To be clear, it isn’t the 81-year-old Nobel laureate himself: it’s his best-selling 2011 book Thinking Fast and Slow. Let me back up. I read fiction quickly, sometimes gobbling up a novel…

  • Pragmatics: you can only walk through one door at a time

    Sharon washed up at the table next to me during a post-conference dinner here in Bergen and opened up over beer and reindeer steaks. She’s a bright young woman about to finish a Masters in finance and economics who doesn’t know how to approach the post-graduation void. Sharon started reeling off different directions and opportunities,…

  • My 2014 in Books

    I read a lot — magazines, two newspapers, email newsletters, and countless social-media-shared links I chase down digital rabbit holes. I’d never know anything, for example, without Jason Hirshhorn’s magnificent daily Media Redefined. But I’m lost without books.  Actual books.  Whether paper or digital, if I’m not reading at least two books then I get…

  • In Praise of Atul Gawande’s “The Checklist Manifesto”

    I first smacked my forehead (ouch!) against a wall of decision fatigue when I was the Editor in Chief of iMedia Connection (a daily trade journal covering a different collision between marketing and technology). The best part of editing involves coaxing order from mess, making points pointier and helping writers to say what they want…

  • “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” now live on Medium

    My latest Medium post — “Future Tweets: Amazon knocks out Ticketmaster” just went live on Medium.  Here are the first few paragraphs: After my eight year old son accidentally set the clock on my computer forward things got weird on Twitter. Tweets had the time signature from 2019 complete with links, but when I clicked…

  • New piece on Medium: “The Next Airline Disruption”

    I just uploaded a new piece to Medium.com about how the airline industry can practice innovation through simplification. Excerpt: Here’s how a savvy airline can disrupt the rest of the industry: create a secondary market in airline tickets that allows customers to buy and sell tickets to each other with no fees.   Need to…

  • Giving Medium a whirl

    Just uploaded my first post on Medium, the new publication platform: “’Bossypants’ as startup bible.” Comments appreciated.