Coté's Commonplace Book
We move to Amsterdam in 5 days. We’re nearly done packing up our whole house. It’s surprisingly easy to just get rid of things, all things: clothes, kitchen stuff, furniture. People say this all the time and it’s true: you should get your house in shape for selling while you live there so you can enjoy it yourself. I doubt we’ll do it - because, life - but having a true spring cleaning where you get rid of stuff as if you’re moving seems like a good idea.
Meanwhile, here’s this week’s stuff.
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Packing |
User-generated content
I’d really like to publish this as a collection of my article and such one day. The topic is niche enough to make such thoughts self-aggrandizing, but hey, here I am thinking it.
I wasn’t in this week’s episode, see “moving.” Brandon and Matt talk about Google Next: This week we cover all the important announcements from the Google Next conference including: GKE On-Prem, Knative and “serverless containers.” Plus, an important parenting discussion on tying shoes.
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People just come and take stuff! |
We talk about regular topics, mostly.
Computer maths
- Feel productive to deliver value quickly.
- Feel autonomous to drive outcomes.
- Feel inspired and motivated to create and thrive.
- Feel psychologically safe to experiment, fail, and be vulnerable.
- Feel they are growing to achieve mastery.
{Arjun Shah writes:}Specifically, a strong software development culture is one in which software developers:
{Coté:} And then, following, some (brief) advice for leaders/managers to put such bullet points into pace.
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Serverless is growing, and fast. Several key adoption metrics are 2x what they were last year. And not just with smaller companies; the enterprise is adopting serverless technologies for critical workloads just as rapidly. Much charts.
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the massive online retailer once again posted its largest quarterly profit in history — $2.5 billion for the quarter — on the back of two businesses that were afterthoughts just a few years ago: Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing unit, as well as its fast-growing advertising business. Good charts, too.
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Kind of a good list of how to align short, agile cycles to longer, strategic planning. Key, I think, is understanding the stability and predictably needs of strategic planning and explaining how short agile loops increase the confidence the corporate can have in both it’s plans and better intelligence about the market and what works. In practice, the lack of continuous feedback loops between operational units and C-suite leaders leads to the misalignment of resources. Lack of communication makes course adjustment nearly impossible.
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if you don’t require immutability, trust and tokenization, you might want to consider a different approach other than blockchain
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Google cloud
Knative is an open source software layer that helps cloud service providers and enterprise platform operators deliver a serverless experience to developers on any cloud.
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Putting 3rd party middleware into Google Cloud: “Among the commercial applications included in the marketplace are big data, database and machine learning applications along with developer tools. Meanwhile, open source applications range from WordPress and the Apache Cassandra NoSQL database to Apache Spark cluster computing.”
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Anecdotally, I’ve spoken with three developers recently (an ISV, a SaaS, and a small dev shop) and all of them say the same thing: Google cloud is like cloud done for developers, AWS is more for operators.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Target “is migrating key areas of its business to the Google Cloud platform”
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Cloud Build runs a series of automated build steps and then optionally pushes built images to Googles container registry. It is a natural fit with Kubernetes but can be used with both containerised and direct deployments. And more from Ron Miller.
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IRL
My wife informs me that this is all known to deal-hounds. Nonetheless: “The rule of thumb is that there should be at least a 20 percent discount. That’s the number people think is a really good deal.” And more on deals.
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- baggage - extraneous clutter in our own brains which distracts from the conversation in hand
- inner noise - the conversation sets off a train of thoughts which, though fascinating, prevent us from continuing to listen
- control - leaps of understanding about what the person is trying to say, missing his/her actual point entirely
- ping-pong - where a client’s point triggers a memory or an opinion, so we spend the next minutes looking for a suitable gap to express it
- display - where we use the conversation as a tool to express our own knowledge, ignoring the client’s subject matter and making him feel stupid in the bargain
- hidden agenda - where we ensure that the conversation achieves our own goals, forgetting to check that the client’s goals are satisfied.
{Jon writes:} Back in 1997, I wrote an article for my consulting colleagues about blockers to listening. As I’m a hoarder, I still have them so here they are:
- baggage - extraneous clutter in our own brains which distracts from the conversation in hand
- inner noise - the conversation sets off a train of thoughts which, though fascinating, prevent us from continuing to listen
- control - leaps of understanding about what the person is trying to say, missing his/her actual point entirely
- ping-pong - where a client’s point triggers a memory or an opinion, so we spend the next minutes looking for a suitable gap to express it
- display - where we use the conversation as a tool to express our own knowledge, ignoring the client’s subject matter and making him feel stupid in the bargain
- hidden agenda - where we ensure that the conversation achieves our own goals, forgetting to check that the client’s goals are satisfied.
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You should get your haircut (and beard) by this guy
Books
- Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City - he just wrapped up The Golden Age and Spinoza. His case for the title is developing well.
- Measure What Matters, aka “That OKR book - this book is more a collection of startup stories, sprinkled with some comments about what OKRs are. I’ll need to find a more "how to” book/article after this. Unless you like the history of tech, or like to binge on Silicon Valley culture, I’d skip this one.
Read:
- Wait, Blink - the more I listened to this book, the more I liked it. It’s rough at first, but then it’s like this: “[s]he’s the only one who sees everything she sees. And this is of no relevance to anyone else.”
From Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City:
The lasting effects:
Commerce drives a mind-set:
“Even old New York was once New Amsterdam”:
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Fantastic background on this painting in the book.
But again, leaving these points aside - Taleb is arguing with a nonexistent group of people here. He has somehow convinced himself that academic historians are a bunch of nerds sitting in library stacks, getting angry at current events, and channeling their frustration about the world into a vision of the past that sees everything as conflict, and ignores all the fun collaborations between barbers, prostitutes, and merchants. This is precisely the opposite of the vision of academic history that I got from grad school, and the vision that I teach in my classes at UC Santa Cruz. Now, keep in mind that I’m arguing from my own experiences here and those of my most outspoken friends, and hence I assume that Taleb, if he reads this, will accuse me of “overfitting” as well. But I have to wonder - what is he basing his expertise on? A public spat with Mary Beard and perhaps a few bad encounters in NYU hallways, squared against Taleb’s newfound love for Bloch, Braudel, and A History of Private Life. Summary: citations. Always include citations.
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Coté's first law of business: actually charge money for things
After extensive research, we can reveal the shocking result: If you refuse to sell things to people, they won’t pay for them… Eventually these geographic restrictions must fall – but until then, people will find a way to get content, which means content producers and distributors are leaving money on the table. What we’ve found since the Napster freak-out days, I think, is that people will gladly buy digital content if you let them. It’s just another channel. A side lesson learned, using musicians who rise through Soundcloud, etsy, and such is to re-learn the old Gibson quote (1982): “the street finds its own uses for things.” Which is to say, it’s hard to predict (and control) how new sales channels and capabilities will be used in the near, medium, and short term. Best to stay spry and monetize as it comes along rather than try to kill it early on. (There could be something said for “destroying” the pre-Internet market: do digital downloads replace that destruction, or was the TAM preeminently slimmed? I’ve got no time to find charts now, because moving)
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