Photo by Timon Klauser on Unsplash
This newsletter is written for entrepreneurial organisational leaders and aims to help map current events to longer term themes of our context and provide questions, tips and tools that can help in navigating these times.
“I find Suez astonishing for the first hour. It is a ditch in a desert, but a stunning one. The sensation of being hemmed in by huge ships, moving at a stately pace through a man-made waterway, is extraordinary.” - Rose George
““I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. "So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”” ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
“I am of the opinion that the First Minister did not breach the provisions of the Ministerial Code in respect of any of these matters.” - James Hamilton
“The message to the USA is: if you want to help the Canadians, make sure that Meng is returned quickly to China.” - Former Canadian ambassador to China, Guy Saint-Jacques
Quick snippets
Two men and a digger, went to free the Ever Given. Two men, one man and his digger…….
The rise and rise and rise of NFTs - The world is awash with acronyms currently - BTC, NFT, DOGE, SNP, RAF etc. Non-Fungible Tokens (a way of making a digital creation be unique) are all the rage, especially with the first Tweet, by Jack Dorsey, selling for $2.9m this week. John Cleese thinks it’s a bubble, Digital Artist Beeple thinks that it is a bubble (he made $69m for his last piece of digital art so he maybe doesn’t need to talk his own book anymore). I have no clue - I could argue it either way - but that chart is either a ridiculous bubble or it’s the beginning of an exponential curve.
Chewing on this one - I am still fascinated by lab-grown meat and what that could mean for the future of agriculture, use of land, methane emissions, food miles etc, as well as the commensurate impact on rural employment and communities. Reading the words - Y Combinator - Lab Grown Meat - Elk meat was a definite attention grabber. I’ve yet to try some. Send me a link if you know where I can buy some. Especially Elk.
Sending emails late at night or early in the morning is becoming pretty common. I’ve been emailing colleagues at midnight, and sending texts before 7am. Whilst most of my colleagues have the good sense to just ignore these and open at a normal time, it struck me that not everyone in the team is going to feel that freedom, or the agency to elect to defer an ask of a senior person in the organisation. Without guardrails in place in an organisation (such as you can only email between these hours) all we are doing is extending our team’s working hours to an unsustainable level. As if to prove a point, I got distracted whilst writing this paragraph (at 10.34pm) to reply to a series of emails I had just received from a colleague, where we were both seeking information from an analyst on our team and sometimes just copying him in for info. It’s not just about personal boundaries, it’s also about where are you invading other people’s boundaries and they don’t feel they can say no. I’m open to ideas on this one.
How value and reward in the workplace is shifting away from you - Who are the robber barons of the future? The people who used to sit next to you at the office. Read this article about the rise of the 10x class. And that brings us back to NFTs again.
A Long Read for the Weekend
I found recently that I am currently reading 12 books, which is a slightly excessive number. I am really enjoying Russell Brunson’s “Traffic Secrets” about click funnels and follow on funnels - very helpful and practical around email lists and digital marketing and sales.
However, the one that has resonated this week is a lighter one - the novel “2034: A Novel of the Next World War”. Without giving away the plot (albeit the title does a good job of that), there is one moment where the Chinese manage to destroy a large amount of US navy vessels by a mass cyber attack, followed by conventional warfare that can no longer be defended against.
It’s a good example of he who controls cyberspace will increasingly control the battlefield, the roads, the airways and the shipping (hard to see a robot ship blocking the Suez Canal for example). However, what happens when the control of the algorithms allows you to predict and determine behaviours and that through that you can pre-empt, control, divert or re-educate?
Too paranoid? Or a realistic concern? I’m no technophobe - but AI and Machine Learning raise some challenging questions - as being seen in China with its surveillance technology.
Thanks for reading. Please do forward this on to anyone you feel might find it interesting - and do share any feedback or insights you have.