The100: Selling ideas, yes/yes questions and growing older

Part myth-busting, part reality check, part blueprint

Her Serene Highness of Talking Massive Sense, Zoe Scaman, is currently helping one of the UK’s largest retailers with their AI and data infrastructure. And she’s written a field guide to testing, prototyping, scaling and deploying AI across an enterprise. 

“You also need to know what you’re giving up in exchange for speed. Are you seeding someone else’s model with your customer insights? Are you making your proprietary pricing logic part of their system’s inference patterns? Are you allowing exposure of edge-case data that reveals your future product roadmap? You don’t need to share data to test AI. You just need to be smart about what data, when, and why. Start small. Start anonymised. And when in doubt: assume the whole damn internet is watching.”

“Making an idea real in the room, long enough for it to be bought”

What can advertising, film, fashion and tech teach us about selling? Based on what David Burns has shared, quite a lot…

His slides on how to sell ideas like the creative industry cover the likes of structuring a presentation (slides 17-35), pitch theatre (36-45), building relationships (46-53) and doing the numbers (54-61).

Choose your own adventure: Business edition

In his latest word weld of wisdom, Andy Bounds has shared how to increase your chances of getting a “yes”. 

“the best way to stop a “no”? Don’t allow “no” as an answer! Instead, offer them options […] In a meeting with someone, and wanting to meet them again? Do NOT say “Shall we meet again?” – they might say NO. Instead, say “When shall we meet again – later this week, early next week, a different time?” […] Always offer options.  And you’ve turned a yes/no choice into a yes/yes.”

When would be a good time for you to tell all your colleagues about The100 and how Einsteingly smart, devastatingly witty and yet ceaselessly humble its author is? Now, or after finishing this email? 😉 

The city as corridor, not a commons

MIT’s Senseable City Lab has found that people are walking faster and lingering less in public spaces. Gentrification, rising affluence, mobile phones and coffee shop culture all have the finger of blame hovering over them. Rima Sabina Aouf of Deezn says:

“The models calculated that over those 30 years, the median walking speed rose from 1.25 to 1.41 metres per second, equivalent to a 15 per cent increase, and the number of people stopping to linger – defined as reducing their speed to below 0.5 metres per second – fell from 43 per cent to 26 per cent. In 1980, one in 20 people interacted with those around them, while in 2010, it was just one in 50.”

27 notes on growing old(er)

Ian Leslie gave my grey matter a right hook this week with his dazzlingly bittersweet thoughts on growing older. 

“The American poet George Oppen said my favourite thing about growing old: “What a strange thing to happen to a little boy.” I love how this evokes the subjectivity of a bewildered child trapped inside an aged body; a boy staring at his wizened hands and wondering what on earth is going on.”

And finally…

Yufeng Zhao and The Pudding have produced a rather wonderful analysis of every visible word on New York City’s streets. Eat your heart out ‘Share of Search’ and ‘Share of Voice’, this is ‘Share of NYC’. 

Highlights from International Aerial Photographer of the Year. Mega.

Meanwhile, in Australia… (pretty sure this is AI, but it made me chuckle nonetheless.)