Every week, we put together a list of our top 5 articles of the past week. Happy reading!
One thing that doesn’t obtain any discussion in the tech industry is the human impact. This is an important piece of reporting by CNN that uncovers the dark side, depression. Laurie Segall interviews influential leaders in the field to understand what they went through and how it can be avoided in the future.
Meetings — A culture of excess that hurts our productivity and morale Justin Baker, Hacker Noon
This cartoon from Dilbert sums up this article pretty well.
The constant meeting culture is a huge problem for companies. In most companies, an employee can’t spend more than $500 without some sort of approval but if you call a meeting with 10 people, no one notices. Justin Baker gives great insights on what to do to make meetings more effective and less time consuming.
At BuzzFeed, a Pivot to Movies and Television NY Times
Buzzfeed is the most interesting new media company. What I find interesting about them is the scale of their ambitions. This NYT piece dives into their efforts in original content. The goal? Diversify their revenue streams.
How Netflix made stranger things a global phenomenon Wired
Halloween is around the corner and scary movies and TV shows will be the norm this weekend. Stranger Things by NetFlix has taken the entire world by storm (no spoilers here). This Wired article uncovers the strategy used by NetFlix to make it a global hit. The powerful part of NetFlix’s strategy is that their entire catalogue is available to everyone, so new users benefit more by using the service.
Closing the Gap Between Strategy and Execution MIT Sloan Review
This article really speaks to what preoccupies most of our day to day- moving from strategy to execution. It’s such an important problem to solve for companies today because of the speed of change.
In fast-paced industries, companies should think of strategy as an iterative loop with four steps: making sense of a situation, making choices, making things happen and making revisions.