Tag Archives: Business

In My Hands Today…

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The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder – Robert I. Sutton, Huggy Rao

Every organization is plagued by destructive friction—the forces that make it harder, more complicated, or downright impossible to get anything done. Yet some forms of friction are incredibly useful, and leaders who attempt to improve workplace efficiency often make things even worse. Drawing from seven years of hands-on research, The Friction Project by bestselling authors Robert I. Sutton and Huggy Rao teaches readers how to become “friction fixers,” so that teams and organizations don’t squander the zeal, damage the health, and throttle the creativity and productivity of good people—or burn through cash and other precious resources.

Sutton and Rao kick off the book by unpacking how skilled friction fixers think and act like trustees of others’ time. They provide friction forensics to help readers identify where to avert and repair bad organizational friction and where to maintain and inject good friction. Then their help pyramid shows how friction fixers do their work, which ranges from reframing friction troubles they can’t fix right now so they feel less threatening to designing and repairing organizations. The heart of the book digs into the causes and solutions for five of the most common and damaging friction oblivious leaders, addition sickness, broken connections, jargon monoxide, and fast and frenzied people and teams.

Sound familiar? Sutton and Rao are here to help. They wrap things up with lessons for leading your own friction project, including linking little things to big things; the power of civility, caring, and love for propelling designs and repairs; and embracing the mess that is an inevitable part of the process (while still trying to clean it up).

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Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies that Broke Television – Peter Biskind

We are now lucky enough to be living through the era of so-called Peak TV, in which television, in its various formats, has seized the entertainment mantle from movies and dominates our leisure time. How and why this happened is the subject of this book.

Instead of focusing on one service, like HBO, Pandora’s Box asks, “What did HBO do besides give us The Sopranos?” The answer: It gave us a revolution. Biskind bites off a big chunk of entertainment history, following HBO from its birth to maturity, moving on to the basic cablers like FX and AMC, and ending with the streamers and their wars, pitting Netflix against Amazon Prime Video, Max, and the killer pluses—Disney, Apple TV, and Paramount.

Since the creative and business sides of TV are thoroughly entwined, Biskind examines both, and the interplay between them. Through frank and shockingly intimate interviews with creators and executives, Pandora’s Box investigates the dynamic interplay of commerce and art through the lens the game-changing shows they aired—not only old warhorses like The Sopranos, but recent shows like The White Lotus, Succession, and Yellow- (both -stone and -jackets)—as windows into the byzantine practices of the players as they use money and guile to destroy their competitors. With its long view and short takes—riveting snapshots of behind-the-scenes mischief—Pandora’s Box is the only book you’ll need to read to understand what’s on your small screen and how it got there.

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Writing for Busy Readers: Communicate More Effectively in the Real World – Todd Rogers, Jessica Lasky-Fink

Writing well is for school. Writing effectively is for life .

Todd Rogers and Jessica Lasky-Fink offer the most valuable practical writing advice today. Building on their own research in behavioral science, they outline cognitive facts about how people actually read and distill them into six principles that will transform the power of your
Including many real-world examples, a checklist and other tools, this guide will make you a more successful and productive communicator. Rogers and Lasky-Fink bring Strunk and White’s core ideas into the twenty-first century’s attention marketplace.

When the influential guides to writing prose were written, the internet hadn’t been invented. Now, the average American adult is inundated with digital messages each day. With all this correspondence, capturing a busy reader’s attention is more challenging than ever. This is how to do it.

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Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification – Gene Kim, Steven J. Spear

In this powerful new book, bestselling and award-winning authors Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear present a surprisingly simple theory to explain outstanding organizational performance… and show you how to replicate it in your own enterprise.

Each drawing on three decades of research and working with high-performing organizations across almost every industry and phase of value creation, Kim and Spear have come to a surprising winning comes from how leaders deliberately design their management systems around people’s ingenuity and how individuals’ creativity is integrated into a collaborative effort. This liberates the capabilities of the people within the organization, enabling them to continually push the frontiers of performance. These leaders have wired their organizations to win.

This is opposed to leaders who set their focus first on maximizing efficiency and optimizing for functional specialties, relying on planning, scheduling, and expediting, and yet never realizing those goals. Instead, they create high coordination costs and increase the cognitive burden, all of which constrain and sometimes even extinguish people’s ability to contribute. This is how leaders wire an organization for dismal outcomes. These results shouldn’t be surprising.

After all, on an otherwise level playing field, the only source of sustained competitive advantage is how well people’s intellectual capabilities can be engaged. Kim and Spear explain how organizations can move from the danger zone to the winning zone by employing three key slowification, which makes it easier to solve problems; simplification, which makes problems easier to solve; and amplification, which ensures problems are seen and solved.

Using over twenty case studies that span a wide variety of sectors, Kim and Spear present a new theory of performance and management that shows how the decisive factor in high-performing enterprises is organizational wiring that enables innovation, excellence, and greatness to flourish. Wiring the Winning Organization teaches leaders how to move from the danger zone to the winning zone to achieve greater agility, higher quality, faster time to market, greater resilience, and higher employee engagement and profitability.

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Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup’s Quest to End Privacy as We Know It – Kashmir Hill

New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill was skeptical when she got a tip about a mysterious app called Clearview AI that claimed it could, with 99 percent accuracy, identify anyone based on just one snapshot of their face. The app could supposedly scan a face and, in just seconds, surface every detail of a person’s online their name, social media profiles, friends and family members, home address, and photos that they might not have even known existed. If it was everything it claimed to be, it would be the ultimate surveillance tool, and it would open the door to everything from stalking to totalitarian state control. Could it be true?

In this riveting account, Hill tracks the improbable rise of Clearview AI, helmed by Hoan Ton-That, an Australian computer engineer, and Richard Schwartz, a former Rudy Giuliani advisor, and its astounding collection of billions of faces from the internet. The company was boosted by a cast of controversial characters, including conservative provocateur Charles C. Johnson and billionaire Donald Trump backer Peter Thiel—who all seemed eager to release this society-altering technology on the public. Google and Facebook decided that a tool to identify strangers was too radical to release, but Clearview forged ahead, sharing the app with private investors, pitching it to businesses, and offering it to thousands of law enforcement agencies around the world.
      
Facial recognition technology has been quietly growing more powerful for decades. This technology has already been used in wrongful arrests in the United States. Unregulated, it could expand the reach of policing, as it has in China and Russia, to a terrifying, dystopian level.
     
Your Face Belongs to Us is a gripping true story about the rise of a technological superpower and an urgent warning that, in the absence of vigilance and government regulation, Clearview AI is one of many new technologies that challenge what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once called “the right to be let alone.”