Top articles of the week | January 18

January 18, 2020

Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!

Agile Success Pattern: Start with Managers, not Teams Michael Sahota (reading time: 3 minutes)

Agile and Scrum in particular is meant to disrupt the hierarchy. How can managers find their proper role. This post helps demystify agile management and provides some great tips for managers.

Your Strategy Needs a Strategy Harvard Business Review (reading time: 21 minutes)

It you haven’t guessed, we’re a bunch of strategy nerds at work. We love revisiting past models and theories. This is a classic from Martin Reeves (BCG). He makes the claim that organizations need more than one type of strategy, there are actually four: classical, adaptive, shaping, and visionary.

The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite Matthew Ball (reading time: 41 minutes)

What will be the next computing platform? It’s relatively easy to predict what it will be but very challenging the timing, context and governance. Matthew Ball suggests that the new wave will be the Metaverse (aka the Matrix); a continuous virtual world with its own economy that is pervasive. It’s a persuasive vision (and a scary one). He writes a compelling piece of what will be the necessary for this next paradigm to emerge.

How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust Benedict Evans (reading time: 12 minutes)

Failing to make it isn’t about a lack of aggression or execution – it’s that it’s really hard.

This is a fantastic post about big tech and anti-trust. There have been heated debates on how to stop the market dominance / abuse from GAFA. If we look to past to draw analogies, IBM and Microsoft are pretty good examples in tech. Both lost market dominance because the market shifted, not because of anti-trust regulation.

What we learned in our fifth year PNR (reading time: 4 minutes)

I wrote a short post describing what we’ve learned after 5 years at PNR. It’s not meant to be a celebratory post but rather a summary of key learnings. The most important element for me is the team. The culture and team is a huge source of pride and something that can’t be taken for granted.