The100: Strategy advice, conflated data and Dirty Dancing

This is just the beginning

The BBC has published a list of 101 people, ideas and things that are changing the way we work today.  The potential for a competitive e-residency market is intriguing, and ‘JOMO’ is utterly brilliant.

Willy Wonka is a postman

On the topic of workplaces, these trivia and pictures from Roald Dahl’s Writing Hut are an insight into the mind of a creative genius. As the man himself says:

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

I may just try the wolves trick with my own children 😉

Don’t write a strategy, listen for it

Anna Shipman’s write up of Russell Davies’s strategy advice are worth reading (as are her notes on the book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy). Take the story about Muhammed Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee:

…It was quite hard to tell Ali what to do so Dundee would just wait until Ali did the right thing and then praise it fulsomely. Communicating strategy might be a bit like that. Wait until people say something good about the strategy and then use that.

And here’s how not to do it…

Turns out the 2 small arrows commonly seen on packs across Europe don’t actually mean what many of us think they do.

And the results are pretty devastating. Dave Trott questions the motivations behind the awful(ly deceptive?) strategy.

Data doesn’t say anything

Being a professor of data science at NYU, Andrea Jones-Rooy isn’t anti-data by any means. However, she is skeptical about data and thinks we’ve conflated data with truth.

Data is not a perfect representation of reality. It’s a fundamentally human construct, and therefore subject to biases, limitations, and other meaningful and consequential imperfections.

She explains that there are 4 ways we introduce those imperfections into data; random errors, systematic errors, errors of choosing what to measure and errors of exclusion.

A piece in Media Post waves a similar red flag and advises that 1st party data is overrated and misunderstood. This line is a killer:

Retailers have more data than anyone, and [yet] we are in the middle of a so-called retail apocalypse. [So] Why didn’t their first-party data save them?

(h/t Kurt Kendall)

Though, of course, there’s always exceptions. Over to the ever-fantastic Mark Ritson on Lidl surprises…

The incongruous details of daily life

Shin Noguchi has been photographing the “extraordinary ordinary” of Japanese life.

People barely have time to observe the figure of themselves in the mirror, let alone pay attention to the appearance of other people and things around them that can offer comparison with and elucidation of their own lives.

Walk, wonder, watch

And after the Marketing Industry took a bashing from Reach for its low levels of empathy (as featured in the last issue of The100), it’s publication continues to poke the bear. Marie Maurer’s funny, well-written and refreshing piece is one of my favourites.

Dirty Dancing meets House of Pain

And as a MASSIVE treat to anyone who a) likes Music and b) loves Films, Lewis Wake has taken famous dance sequences from movies and put different songs on top. There’s a whole thread of these beauties. Absolute genius.