Scaling Support

A lot of the work I've done over the past decade could be framed as a support function, in both connotations: * we provide support to a specific audience in terms of how they learn or perform their jobs. * the work is in support of a larger business function,

Missions and Institutions

Over the past few months I've been deep in the process of reflecting on what I've learned over the past decade and playing with different ideas regarding how they might come together in a relevant way considering the times. Between the teaching work, our programs at

Dislocation not a Downturn

There's never been a better time to be on salaried knowledge worker at a company with deep pockets, but if you're not—like me—then you've got the added burden of thinking about what the future will hold and what you do or don&

Designing Challenges

One of the key insights from the past 8 years of the Post-Industrial Design School project was understanding what made the $1K Challenge an effective teaching tool. We ran the $1K Challenge mostly as part of the Entrepreneurial Design course at SVA IxD, but also at Orbital.  The most recent

Making Sense vs. Making a Plan

There's a common pitfall that I need to constantly remind myself of, which is that the process of making sense of a space is separate and distinct from planning where you want to actually go and how you will get there. This is a particularly hard problem when

Isolation vs. Deliberate Solitude

Like many, I've been sheltering in place in my apartment over the past month.  While I have been jumping on occasional video calls with friends and family, and holding weekly happy hours with the Orbital members, I certainly haven't gone above and beyond like some my

Revisiting Networks as Governments

This tweet came across my timeline yesterday: Not even an email... My wife’s store got the Shopify Capital offer via Kit (messaging) and got it all sorted out in seconds. So timely, so helpful. Just awesome! 👏 https://t.co/LCwikh4Mw5 pic.twitter.com/Dj3PggCBEp — Yoni Levy (@MrYoniLevy) April 20,

Deaths of Despair

I was listening to NPR One via my Amazon Echo yesterday, and heard an interview with Anne Case, an economist at Princeton University, and co-author of Deaths of Despair And The Future of Capitalism, which looks at the gap between those who did and didn't go to college.

Retooling

I spent the past two weeks digging into the details of how to customize Ghost, the publishing software I'm using for this site, which has then led to learning more about what the product is capable of doing, which has led to more questions, which inevitably results in

This is Members

This is a free post

Where does it go? To whom does it go to?

Zooming Out

In the past decade plus we've seen a number of compounding factors that have formed a sort-of "perfect storm of entropy" leading to many of the challenges we see today. Obviously, top of mind is globalization and urbanization, which has created the optimal conditions for an

Systems over Effort

One of the biggest changes I've made over the years as a recovering overachiever has been to rely on installing systems to guide my behavior rather than attempt to hold myself to high expectations. For whatever reason, I've always held the assumption that outcomes were solely

Creativity as Recombination

Business at a macro-level can often be described as an ebb and flow process of bundling and unbundling, aggregating and disaggregating. These are like weather patterns.  Sometimes the conditions are right to pursue an aggregation strategy as an upstart.  Perhaps there's an opening that is too small for

Attention is Shifting

One of the more understated but significant changes of the pandemic is that attention models have changed. For example, there's no commute. We're staying inside our homes. There's no access to childcare services. We're fatigued from being on Zoom calls all day.

Afterwards

Yesterday, Morgan Stanley released a report by their head of biotech research, Matthew Harrison, which has the following prognosis: Morgan Stanley: “While we understand the desire for optimism, we also caution that the US outbreak is far from over. Recovering from this acute period in the outbreak is just the

Why I Blog

There are a bunch of reasons why I started this blog.  Primarily, it's for me. I see blogging as daily exercise, kind of like running.  Just as there's a myriad of benefits to having a regular practice of running, the same goes for having a daily

Disaggregation, Narratives and Outcomes

Right now, there is no shortage of graphs and data vizualizations ranging from actuals vs. models, to the US compared to other countries, predictions, and much much more. Here is a chart of monthly death totals in New York City over the past two decades. https://t.co/UCo821zofh pic.

Creating vs. Testing vs. Building

Starting and running a business is a great way to reveal the gaps of your own lived experience. Inevitably, you'll run into plenty of unexpected challenges you haven't previously seen (i.e. unknown unknowns) that require use of judgement, and you'll realize that your

'New Subscriber Growth' as the driver of social progress

I don't think I can say enough how excited I am for the Netflix Premieres of both Alan Yang's Tigertail (out today), and Alice Wu's The Half of It (coming May 1st): Alan co-created Master of None with Aziz Ansari, and Alice's

The Physical Realm

As expected, layoffs are starting to hit many of the larger tech companies, particularly those that are built around local businesses and in-person engagement.  These are second-order effects as a result of social distancing and quarantine measures.  There will be more layoffs coming, as we're still at the

Prototyping Organizations

For the past few weeks, I've been studying how a range of distributed companies work in parallel with efforts to try and figure out what the next evolution of Orbital looks like. The former has been a lot easier given the pandemic, as there's been no

Collective Grant Making

As you'd expect, accessing the Federal aid from the CARES Act has been a challenge: Fuck this entire PPP process right in the ear. — Rick Webb (@RickWebb) April 6, 2020 Jared goes into much more detail on the challenges: The Payroll Protection Program is absolute chaos. But today

Mission-Driven Playbook

One of the implications of our current pandemic is that we'll have an increasing interest in creating projects, ventures, companies that have a positive impact. This has already been trending up, particularly with younger entrepreneurs who are seeing that they're going to be dealing with the

Where to Start

It's been devastating to be sitting around and watching everything fail.  It's not necessarily a surprise that a huge part of our society has been living in precarity and that the government has failed to protect the vulnerable. For specifics, read this entire tweet thread for