Top articles of the week | May 2

May 2, 2020

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

Five Lessons from History Collaborative Fund (reading time: 21 minutes)

I love reading about history and I’ve been reading more these days to try to make sense of how people lived through turbulent times in the past. This is an amazing post Morgan Housel written last year but it might as well been written yesterday. He provides five key lessons from history that are tremendously applicable today. #highlyrecommend

The Open Information Ecosystem Jeff Jarvis (reading time: 9 minutes)

It has evident that the deluge of information online and in the news makes it difficult to filter the signal from the noise. The topic is even more important with academics and scientists now sharing their research papers on social media. NYC journalist and writer Jeff Jarvis provides a few guidelines on how this can happen. Personally, I believe that this topic is going to gain in importance. As people start looking for primary sources of information, research papers need to be more open & discoverable.

The first modern pandemic Bill Gates (reading time: 32 minutes)

If you had any doubts about Bill Gates’ knowledge on the subject of pandemics/viruses, this post helps disprove that notion. It’s a long read but is one of the best articles on potential avenues on beating the virus. He explains some highly technical concepts pretty simply and shows how much he’s been involved with his foundation since leaving Microsoft.

Planifier l’avec-COVID plutôt que l’après-COVID Henri-Paul Rousseau, LaPresse (reading time: 4 minutes)

I shared a few weeks ago a long white paper by Henri-Paul Rousseau. He explained his view on how we can prepare for a post-Covid world where we’re dealing with the virus daily. I was also lucky enough to be part of a webinar where he further explained his concepts. In this short article in LaPresse, he summarizes his arguments and gives some great recommendations.

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making Harvard Business Review (reading time: 16 minutes)

As our firm tries to further our knowledge on complex decision making, we came upon this old post in HBR. Complex decision making is much more prevalent than we imagine and the current crisis definitely reveals that. The authors explain the Cynefin framework that leaders can use to guide decision making.

Most situations and decisions in organizations are complex because some major change—a bad quarter, a shift in management, a merger or acquisition—introduces unpredictability and flux.