Top articles of the week | November 5th

November 4, 2017

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

How to Master the Craft of Strategy — Why One Decision can Make your Company, and How to Get it Right Eric Jorgenson, Medium

As a student of strategy, I loved reading this article by Eric Jorgenson. It provides a good view on the most important strategy books and dissects the underlying principles. If you are interested in business strategy and competitive advantage as concepts, this is a great read.

95 Theses about Technology John Naughton

John Naughton, an academic and a newspaper columnist and he has assembled a number of theses about technology. His reasons for doing this project:

I like the idea of using a ‘thesis’ as a way of starting off a discussion. Long ago, this was a standard way of conducting scholarly debates. I thought it would be interesting to try it again as a way of sparking public interest in what digital technology is doing to us. We’re in the early stages of a radical transformation of our information environment. It’s happening on a scale that has only been matched once before in history

He’s only written the first 25 theses and they are all immensely relevant.

What if large tech firms were regulated like sewage companies? The Economist

The growing call for regulation and antitrust against the big tech firms is the key news item in 2017. The Economist argues that these firms should be regulated and also offers a practical approach as to what that regulation might look like. However, it also realizes that in today’s world, it will be a tough sell.

What Will Our Lives Be Like as Cyborgs? The Atlantic

There is a new religion in the world, Dataism. Tim O’Reilly argues that we will inevitably merge with machines and that this transformation will be a huge boon for humanity. I loved this article but found it terrifying at the same time.

Reboot for the AI revolution Yuval Noah Harari, Nature

I’m a huge fan of Yuval Harari and devoured his two recent books, Sapiens and Homo Deus. In this article, he provides some deeper insights into where we are headed with automation and more importantly offers some interesting solutions on what can be done. From education to tax reform, Yuval is suggesting some interesting approaches to the inevitable economic disruption of this century.