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Leading US bosses drop shareholder-first principle.
As the article opens …
“The real test will be in deeds not words.”
Have to say until action - and I mean real action - this jury is out!
Read the opinion by Larry Elliott in The Guardian
Watching. I don’t think People First has won just yet!
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I have a schedule of material that I am working on, but what would you like to read about next? What drives you to read this weekly missive? What topics are you most interested in reading about. Learning about?
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Content is a horrible, generic, cheap, ‘anything will do’ kind of word. Which is why it has no value.
STOP using their words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR beliefs. Our passion. OUR effort.
START using our words to describe OUR work. OUR soul. OUR beliefs. Our passion. OUR effort.
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Needless to say those three words grabbed my attention immediately. And then when he said …
The culture of schooling is radically at odds with the culture of learning that produces innovators.
Tony Wagner
I was hooked.
Very good Ted Talk - just one gripe …
He just about opens the talk with
I came to understand, that there’s a set of core competencies every young person must be well on their way to mastery before he or she finished high school.
critical thinking and problem solving
collaboration across networks and leading by influence
agility and adaptability
initiative and entropenorialism
effective oral and written communication
accessing and analyzing information
curiosity and imagination
Tony Wagner
i.e. if you have left school, sorry - we taught you all wrong as to how to succeed in the life in front of you.
What he should have said was
I came to understand, that there’s a set of core competencies every person must master.
I know he doesn’t mean it and I guess it is about education - but the implication is that you have left school then ‘we taught you all wrong’.
Keeping that in mind … well worth a watch.
Gallery Learning passion play purpose ted talk tony wagner archive.pf.business
Double Digits
Though this Newsletter has been around intermittently for a few years now, I only harnessed it as a vehicle to share People First thinking in May of this year, Issue One going out on May 31st. Since the launch in May, readership has been steadily growing and judging by the emails received I have hit some nerves with some of the pieces. Definitely a good time to take stock and recap where we have got to.
Alberto Laszlo Barabasi @ LinkedIN
Alberto is a pioneer in network science, Albert-László Barabási uncovers the hidden order behind complex systems.
Excellent summary of how what we just assume to be the truth is bunkum. This applied to our assumptions about age. Bottom line - you are never too old
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
agesism albert-laszlo barabasi Audio ted talk Work archive.pf.businessTwo years ago a good friend delivered a ‘pitch deck’ to a deeply technical company that was trying to humanize their otherwise bland, cryptic and highly technical message, so that a business leader could understand their offer and make a decision to buy or invest.
All members of the team were ‘old’, ‘white’, ‘male’, ’technically deep and not an ethics major or emotionally connected person to be found (at least in the core decision making team)
As someone who has spent their life translating meaning between disparate communities, when I saw it, I thought it was very good, rather clever and perfect for the job at hand.
‘They’ didn’t get it. ‘They’ thought it demonstrated a lack of understanding of the tech. ‘They’ felt that it totally missed the point, minimizing and making light of the deeply profound technical work that they had done to get them to this point.
‘They’ said that it was absolutely and clearly ‘demonstrated’ that the writer of said deck was incapable of understanding the technical nuances of this company and its offer.
‘They’ not only parted ways, but reneged on a share deal and did not pay the final bill.
Why would they? It was clear that the deck creator didn’t get it … how else could they have missed the target so badly?
As far as the reneging on the shares is concerned - who cares …. thirty months later the team continues to work on their baby and nothing has changed in or with the team other than they are 30 months older and funding and customers remain out of their grasp. The shares remain at the fraction of the penny that they have always been
But I guess there is one thing that changed … Messaging.
I just read a blog post by one of the leadership team.
It was a human, emotionally connected story. It was relevant.
It used the concept of the deck
It used words from the deck.
The story was the deck.
Even more galling - but I guess a sign of the times. My friend was a woman. A woman who is superbly talented in communications and marketing. Who has advised CEOs and Governments on strategy. Who was born with more insight and EQ than most people would build in a lifetime, let alone this particular team that I also happen to know.
Pearls before swine.
observations
Dignity at Work
https://embed.ted.com/talks/roy_bahat_and_bryn_freedman_what_is_the_meaning_of_work
Let me know what you think in the comments.
Roy Bahat invests in the future of work, with a focus on automation, data, robotics, media, productivity tools and more.
I sat down to watch this with great anticipation and was thoroughly disappointed. It’s not just that it wasn’t a good interview - it wasn’t - but the thinking espoused by Roy just didn’t resonate for me.
Yes he’d done research and talked to people - but that is at odds with what anyone can see if they open their eyes.
⭐️⭐️
future of work Gallery meaning roy bahat ted talk video Work archive.pf.business
Karin-Edgett
As I finished this short post, I headed out to the ‘google-web-net’ to see if I could find a suitable and representative image. I was failing unitl I focussed on ‘Redux’. The images associated with Redux are highly Redux oriented, with a high degree of focus on their logo. What you might expect, given the name - but this is not about what they do. So I kept looking and discovered this.
Let go of everything or anything and breathe.
It’s as if Karin Edgett read my mind. The image was perfect and the words so in tune with my thoughts, that I couldn’t resist.
My entry ‘let go of everything or anything and breathe’ is part of a series of paintings and haiku exploring infinity in it’s transformative sense.
Karin Edgett
Interesting to read this post from Doc Searls today - which also happens to be his birthday.
https://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2012/07/29/the-final-demographic/
Halfway down he writes;
For individuals, demographics are absurd. None of us are an age, much less a range of them. We’re animals who live and work and have fun and do stuff. Eventually we croak, but if we stay healthy we acquire wisdom and experience, and find ourselves more valuable over time.
Yet we become less employable as we climb the high end of the demographic ladder, but not because we can’t do the work. It’s mostly because we look old and our tolerance for bullshit is low. Even our own, which is another bonus.
Doc Searls
Two main thoughts came to mind as I read those words.
Doc doesn’t mention the boomer, gen x,y or z, he doesn’t need to … but he is circling around that world. And it reminded me of one of my posts from three years ago - where I was on one of my rants about the inadequacy of business having to define its markets by generations - if you are 24 to 35 you want this - but if you are 60 plus - you want that etc etc. I couldn’t resist and wrote Generational Categorization Akin To Astrology and not entirely coincidentally a couple of years later : Generational Astrology Redux. I think the second article is better FWIW.
Please stop talking about, categorizing and yes – judging people based on their age – and I do mean judging. It is absolute nonsense and yet we continue to talk and think and communicate in this shorthand because it suits lazy people in corporate marketing departments as they attempt to build personas that purportedly understand us so they can better target their ‘content’. And yes it is – just content. Homogenized, bland, insipid content that drives people along their customer journeys and through their engagement funnels.
John Philpin (Beyond Bridges)
I even managed to weave in some ‘anti-content’ sentiment!
Second thing? Why the newsletter from a couple of weeks ago - Ditch The Binary, which included a quote from Ashton Applewhite.
“Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it’s a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too.”
Ashton Applewhite.
Happy Birthday Doc … there’s definitely ‘Something In The Air’ …
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… I came across this article (note if you are using an ‘ad blocker’ … then guess what - they tell you that you have an ‘ad blocker’ on …. actually I don’t use an ‘ad blocker’ - I use a ’tracking blocker’.
That aside, I thought I would extract some pertinent quotes from the piece and add my comments. The piece appeared in Adage and was written by Jason Jercinovic - and so all the quotes below I attribute to him. Adage says that “Jason Jercinovic is global head of marketing innovation and global brand director at Havas.”
Havas is a pretty good agency that has produced some great campaigns for Air New Zealand, Global Mental Health and Canal+ - so I kind of feel that they (should at least) know what they are doing. I’ll go further. They do - but it is clear that they remain bought into the narrative of ‘poor us - we have to do this [efn_note]Use Ad Trackers[/efn_note] for it to work’. They don’t.
and no one can blame the advertising industry for rapidly adopting them.
I can!
Advertisers may soon know us better than we know ourselves.
… there are more practical considerations around the use of AI in advertising: inherently biased data, algorithms that make flawed decisions and violations of personal privacy.
That is happening now - and nothing to do with AI.
The more complete our understanding of an individual, the more persuasive our marketing can be.
Why does he assume I want to be persuaded?
But each new insight into a consumer raises new questions about our moral obligations to that individual – and to society at large.
… then ask out permission
AI is fueled by data, which is used to train algorithms and sustain the system.
‘Back in the day’, we had an experession ‘Crap in … Crap out’ …. that adage (which is different to the publication) is as relevant as ever.
In order to make an informed choice, consumers need a clear explanation of the value exchange in any given campaign. What are they giving up? What are they getting in return? And they should be allowed to opt out if they are uncomfortable with the transaction.
At last …. sadly - I don’t see much of that happening.
Do you?
ad tracking advertising Data do not track People First Technology tracking archive.pf.business
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