Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?
My friends: Alistair Croll (Solve for Interesting, Tilt the Windmill, HBS; chair of Strata, Startupfest, Pandemonio, and ResolveTO; Author of Lean Analytics and some other books), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik and co-author of Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto) and I decided that every week the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person “must see”.
Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:
- Is it unethical for me to not tell my employer I’ve automated my job? – The Workplace. “You’re paid to do a job. The more efficient and accurate you are at that job, the better you’re doing it. And if you automate it so it’s completely efficient and 100% accurate, you did the best job possible. So should you tell your employer? This is a very real, and likely prescient, question for many industries. It’s one that deserves a lot of attention, and for which there’s no easy answer; does the organization owe an annuity to the employee who, in effect, did their job perfectly?” (Alistair for Hugh).
- What The Enron Emails Says About Us – The New Yorker. “When regulators dug into, and shut down, Enron, they took an unprecedented step: They released all of the company’s emails for public analysis. This is perhaps the biggest public corpus of organizational communications ever released. It tells a tale of corruption, sure, but also of humanity: Divorced fathers beseeching lawyer friends for help; people talking about expense report shenanigans overseas. Since that time, data scientists and analysts have been teasing the data apart with algorithms, generating some surprising conclusions.” (Alistair for Mitch).
- Final Fantasy – The Point. “Read about the writers laying the intellectual underpinnings of the alt-right, and their opposition to our current ear, the ‘Dark Enlightenment’.” (Hugh for Alistair).
- People have an irrational need to complete “sets” of things – Quartz. “Mitch, arch-marketer that he is, probably knows this: people who have five things will almost always buy a sixth, if there are six slots in the box. Find out why.” (Hugh for Mitch).
- A computer was asked to predict which start-ups would be successful. The results were astonishing – World Economic Forum. “It seems like we’re going to dance around the theories of automation and replacement of human beings by machines until… well… it’s too late. Who handles your money? Which bank? Which financial advisor? How are they performing? Why not just pump your info into an artificial intelligence and see how it rides? It makes sense that computers can do this better than humans, at this point. I’m left wondering, if we all can do this, how are we going to keep score? We should all wind up with the same access and the same results from systems like this… right?” (Mitch for Alistair).
- Amazon’s New Customer – Stratechery. “What is Amazon really up to? Many pundits armchair quarterback on this all day. Grokking Amazon is a thing. Still, this is a pretty fascinating look at a company that used to sell books online. No more.” (Mitch for Hugh).
Feel free to share these links and add your picks on Twitter, Facebook, in the comments below or wherever you play.