| Virtual Events: Hopin buys Streamyard | PPM: Planview buys Clarizen, Changepoint | OKR: Gtmhub raises $30M | Work Chat: Channel Calendars |
I took some time off over the holidays and I am astonished by how much has been going on in work technology, both on the innovation and the execution side of things.
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Quote of the Moment
Execution pays your salary. Innovation pays your pension.
| Steve Blank
Great quote, although we may have to substitute ‘pays your pension’ with something more 21st century, like ‘pays your mortgage’, since pensions are pretty iffy these days.
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Virtual Events
Hopin buys livestreaming startup StreamYard for $250M as it looks to expand its product lineup | Alex Wilhelm reports on Hopin acquiring livestreaming platform StreamYard to make it a better-integrated default streaming option for the virtual events…
The learned fall behind
Beacon NY 2021–01–13 | I am experimenting with a shift in my writing: more frequent, but shorter, and focused on a single thread.
…
My focus today is how learning strategies can counter fragility and make us more resilient.
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Quote of the Moment
In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.
| Eric Hoffer
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Beyond resilience: Toward ‘antifragile’ urbanism | Michael Mehaffy is nominally writing about urbanism, but his points have greater impact than that:
Key to this antifragility is the ability to fail in small doses, and to use that failure to “gain from disorder” over time — paradoxically producing a greater order. Muscles get very small tears and strains, resulting in strengthening; a few cells get infections and die, but not before sending out markers that identify the invaders to many other cells. So keeping things “small enough to fail” (as opposed to “too big to fail”) is key. So is the ability to transmit lessons from these small failures, so that the structure can develop new strengths. …
From the German: stab in the back (Dolchstoss im Rücken).
The intersection of journaling and work management
A great deal of my work is about writing, which falls into two sorts:
- Writing posts (like this) and newsletter issues, and
- Writing technology reports (like the recent Workboards report, in concert with Gigaom).
The workflow involved with these two sorts of writing are quite distinct. The former is an outgrowth of the Notion journaling I do on a nearly daily basis, a process I described at some length in Working in Notion | Part 1. The longer-format and more deeply researched reports are part of a quite different process.
In this post, I will outline how I am using Notion to create and manage posts like this one integrated with my daily journaling. I recommend that readers might want to revisit the Part 1 post, especially if they aren’t familiar with Notion. …
Reap the whirlwind
Beacon NY 2021–01–07 | 2021–01–06 will be remembered a long time.
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Quote of the Day
They who sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.
| Hosea 8:7
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Amazon Pledging More Than $2 Billion for Affordable Housing in Three Hub Cities | Nicole Friedman reports on investments by Amazon to support housing through low-cost loans and grants. Another example of giant internet players filling institutional gaps you’d expect to have been filled by governments or other institutions:
Amazon.com Inc. said it would commit more than $2 billion to create and preserve affordable housing in three of its employment hubs, the latest tech giant to make a large investment in easing the U.S. …
If we should ever abandon the Constitution’s protections for the distinctively and universally human, it won’t be because robotics or genetic engineering or computer science have led us to deeper…
We are bounded by belonging
2021–01–06 Beacon NY | A mention on Twitter led me back to a thread from early in the century, as the term ‘publicy’ seems to be resurfacing.
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Quote of the Day
The mass effect of a public world online is not freedom and self-expression, but a subtle, atmospheric repression and self-censorship, when we each internalize the limits and limitations allowed by the groups in which we share ourselves.
| Stowe Boyd, Publicy and Panopticon
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Minimum Office
24 Big Ideas that will change our world in 2021 | Scott Olster talked to a bunch of interesting people, like Ashley Whillans, about 2021:
For many workers, the 9-to-5 will become a…
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
| Anonymous
Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it…
