The Best Thing I Read Today
If you’re anything like me, you see 50–100 articles in your various social feeds every day. I love to read, but I don’t have time to read everything.
What if you could only read one thing each day? What would be the single article that would help you with your job, your family, or your life? That’s why this blog is here.
May 30th, 2015
Salesforce.com is not for sale (supposedly). In any case, no one will buy it at Benioff’s asking price of $70B.
It’s a few days old, but I thought the reasoning behind this post was pretty sound and well-informed. A good piece of tech journalism.
A decent read if you’re trying to work on your own writing.
May 27th, 2015
Today’s best thing was undoubtedly the Freakonomics podcast, titled “Failure Is Your Friend.”
Not only does it feature a segment on the Challenger explosion, but that segment features one of the best examples of integrity I’ve ever heard. Worth a listen for its own sake.
This podcast also spotlights a company which started up an internal auction system as a curative for a corporate culture that didn’t allow for dissent.
Example: The company was opening a new Shanghai store. The CEO asked executives if the store would be successful. 7/7 said it would be a roaring success. Employees were allowed to anonymously bid on a market to show their confidence in the store opening’s success…and no one thought it would succeed. Indeed, the store opening turned out to be a massive failure.
I absolutely love this auction mechanism. It’s a temperature-check on the company and an added incentive for employees to seek information out of silos.
Listen up!
May 26th, 2015
“The game isn’t rigged, but the odds don’t work in your favor.”
Interesting op-ed from an English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. If you’re working class, your college experience is reduced to one bare-bones practicality: get a job.
Unfortunately, the things that you might have to do to support an education that may result in a job don’t exactly help build your resume: stripping, getting paid under the table, etc. — putting working class students at an even greater disadvantage versus their wealthier peers.
Brittany Bronson wraps the stark reality up in a nicely-presented package — Vegas style.
#well-written #timely #meta
May 22nd, 2015
There wasn’t a lot of good reading between May 21st and 22nd. Maybe writers are just getting ready for the holiday weekend in the US.
The best thing I read (well, saw) on May 22nd was this Hefty cups commercial, which made me bust out laughing. Bye, Felicia!
May 20th, 2015
Today’s “one thing” is really several stories about one thing, thanks to Zappos crack PR team. Seriously, I would poach any of them in a second.
Zappos came out yesterday and today with some obviously embargoed news on its new “Holacracy” structure (Inc, WSJ, lots of other places). This may be an attempt to get ahead of some bad news. Or it may just be Tony Hsieh doing some self-promotion. He had a story on NPR a few weeks ago about his Downtown Project. Maybe he’s coming out with a book.
Anyway, per the WSJ, 14% of the company’s staff have quit, post-Holacracy. I’d expect most of these to be among the ranks of people managers, who — let’s face it — have just been constructively laid off.
The upside of Holacracy is (apparently) more agility, more productivity, and a more entrepreneurial workforce. Ok. The downside is that 14% (at least) of your employees quit.
Props to Tony Hsieh for doing something really bold, though. I’m interested to see how this plays out.
- What the heck is a “Holacracy?”
- Core Values of companies that don’t believe in management: GoreTex, Zappos
May 19th, 2015
Basic intro to information architecture. Most interesting part was that there are as many ways to organize things as there are features of that thing. It may sound intuitive, but I thought the explanation was simple and perfect.
via UXHow
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Do you have an article that you think deserves to be the Best Thing Today? Tweet the link to me @asharfin with #bestthing.
May 18th, 2015
Ten Commandments for Being an Entrepreneur
A reprint of wisdom from Fred Wilson from Chidi Afulezi.
Best part: Fred’s thoughts on negotiating. Negotiations shouldn’t be about squeezing the other guy. They should be about aligning the interests of both parties.
“Hardball negotiators are rarely worked with a second time, and only invite further conflict down the road when the numbers are more meaningful. You will become very wealthy by consistently adding to the riches of others.”
Get one best thing you should read, delivered to your inbox each day: http://eepurl.com/bnHorn. Each email contains the full article, summary, and links.
Do you have an article that you think deserves to be the Best Thing Today? Tweet the link to me @asharfin with #bestthing.
May 17th, 2015
Why Is the University Still Here?
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provided by companies such as Udacity and Coursera were supposed to disrupt expensive and time-consuming university education.
Except they didn’t.
There’s a lesson in this article on how you can improve your motivation and help yourself focus on any given task. MOOCs failed because they didn’t establish primacy — making themselves the primary thought activity of the day.
“ Primacy is deeply connected to motivation, since it makes learning the default rather than a conscious decision that we make throughout the day. Furthermore, primacy also allows us to peer deeper into knowledge, since we can make connections between facts and theories that we might otherwise miss out on.”
Take-away: If you want to really focus at a given task or project, set up your environment so that it is the one thing you think about most all day. Some ideas:
- Decorate your office or home to help you focus on the task. For instance, bookcases and textbooks feature prominently in students’ bedrooms. Take a cue from this and surround yourself with the tools for whatever project you’re working on
- Meet up with people who are working on the same or similar projects during your day. If you’re working with them, make sure that you all sit next to each other
- Make the project your homescreen, or the sole item on your desktop/taskbar
I found this article to be inspiring beyond its initial premise, but it’s especially interesting if you care a lot about motivation or education.
Get one best thing you should read, delivered to your inbox each day: http://eepurl.com/bnHorn. Each email contains the full article, summary, and links.
Do you have an article that you think deserves to be the Best Thing Today? Tweet the link to me @asharfin with #bestthing.
May 16th, 2015
What I Learned About Leadership From Interviewing the Biggest Drug Dealer in History
I’m not even going to summarize this one because it’s a crime if you don’t read it for yourself.
Get one best thing you should read, delivered to your inbox each day: http://eepurl.com/bnHorn. Each email contains the full article, summary, and links.
Do you have an article that you think deserves to be the Best Thing Today? Tweet the link to me @asharfin with #bestthing.
