Five Things — October 2016

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Dear friends,

I hope this letter finds you well. Thanks for the feedback sent.

From my end, the first weeks in London have been a huge learning experience and a formidable challenge. I am looking forward to attend Websummit next month, and proud of Portugal for this achievement (thank you Portas…). On this topic, I am starting a research on Internet of Things, if you have some experience, drop me an email.

I kindly request you to continue providing feedback to improve the next newsletters. If you want to read September 2016 newsletter, please click this link.

Thank you for your time,
Alex

#1 A great story about collaboration: the Panama Papers

The stories around Panama Papers are endless, and most of them have not been written yet (Portugal…). A great angle on this case is the story of the largest journalism collaboration in history (107 media organisations in 80 countries).

This TED Talk tells the story of this unique endeavour and shows how it is possible to share and collaborate in large groups, and still be able to keep secrecy. It covers several key topics around collaboration, including trust, networking and technology. As the world moves into distributed organisations/teams, we must all learn from these examples.

As a side note, for people who read “How Google Works”, most of the information at Google is available to all employees (including source code and financials) and the number of leaks has been minimum.

Ted Talk (Youtube, 13 min)

#2 Wells Fargo: can you manage a sales team without goals?

The picture above is the Forbes cover from February 2012. The person on the cover is John Stumpf, CEO of Wells Fargo (largest U.S. bank by market capitalisation) since 2007, who has resigned from his role last week after one of the largest fake accounts scandals in history.

Well Fargo’s retail banking employees created over 2 million fake accounts using customers’ identities to boost their sales numbers. Employees went so far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses.

The most important outcome from this scandal is the announcement Wells Fargo will end sales goals for retail banking. In this video John Stumpf makes the official announcement, before his resign. It is worth viewing this historic moment.

How will Wells Fargo perform without sales goals? This may be one of the most consequential results in the baking industry.

Video (NY Times, 5 min)

#3 Why innovation fails? The Concorde case

Do you remember when we were able to fly from London to New York in 3,5 hours? I was 20 years old when the Concorde made its last flight (2003) and its “rise and fall” story is still surreal to me.

This great and interesting video tells the story of the Concorde, but it is also tells a story of why innovation (and new technology) sticks or fails.

(One little nugget from the video: Concorde was so prone to issues, they always had one backup Concorde parked in London and one in New York, in case they needed it.)

By the way, a new start-up (Boom) is working on bringing SST (super sonic transport) back, this time at a more affordable price: one way ticket will be priced at 2.500€, around half of a Concorde ticket price.

Video (Youtube, 10 min)

#4 Pocket and Readism: my two favourite Chrome extensions for reading the Web

If you are like me, most of your reading nowadays comes from the Web. There are two great apps/browser extensions that have greatly improved my reading experience:

• Pocket: a great app that allows you to do two things (1) you can save pages/articles to read later when you have spare time and (2) has an off-line capability that allows to download the articles to smartphone/tablet and read them without connection (eg during flights). Pocket is available for most smartphones/tables/browsers;
• Readism: a Chrome extension that shows the average reading time of a page/article so you can decide if you read it now or later (save it to Pocket). The extension does not work on all sites, but developers are improving its compatibility.

Based on this combo, my current workflow to read the Web is:

1. Open an article that interests me (from email, social media or Google search);
2. Check the reading time of the article with Readism;
3. If I have time then I will start reading it, else I will save it for later with Pocket;
4. When I have time available, I will open Pocket on my iPad/iPhone and read the articles.

Save to Pocket (Chrome Web Store, requires a Pocket account )
Readism — Article Reading Time (Chrome Web Store)

#5 Best buy this year: Bose noise-cancelling headphones

Since the beginning of 2016 I have made over 50 flights (roughly 200 hours on a plane). As incredible as it may sound, these are some of the most relaxing hours of my work week, thanks to the Bose noise cancelling headphones — no affiliation :) … unfortunately.

I get on my seat, I start playing a podcast (eg Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell), turn on the noise-cancelling and no more airplane engine/loudspeaker noise.

You must experience the noise-cancelling by yourself to grasp its effect, you can usually try them at electronic stores. If you fly often or commute by train these headphones are a must have.

Note 1: The headphones require one AAA battery for the noise-cancelling, I make sure to always pack a rechargeable backup battery. You can still use them as regular headphones without battery.
Note 2: Bose also has noise-cancelling earphones which are much more practical but the noise-cancelling is less effective.

Bose QuietComfort QC-25 (Fnac, 329.99€)
Bose QuietComfort QC-35 (Wireless) (Fnac, 384.99€)