A staff writing job in journalism can be a wonderful thing, and there are far too few of them available these days. But they also come with a relatively low ceiling, at least by the standards of top performers in other industries. An ace reporter at a major American newspaper will struggle to make more than $150,000 a year. That’s great money compared to most jobs in America. It’s also probably not enough to buy a house in any of the cities where, before the pandemic, you could actually get a job paying $150,000 a year.In exchange for that low ceiling, though, reporters got some great benefits, especially if their newsroom was unionized: health care, legal protections, editing, distribution of their work, and a regular salary. The flip side is that the job has not been a particularly stable one over the past two decades: layoffs occur with alarming frequency; American newsrooms lost 16,000 jobs last year.
Velocity does not equal haste. It is possible to deliver high quality work at high velocity. The way to do that is to have a maniacal focus on the fastest path to value. Most delays in projects are not because the person was trying to avoid low quality work. Most delays are because the team wanted to do too much and spent weeks working and planning, and ended up not doing anything at all. If we narrow our focus to the increments of value we are delivering, we can ship quality with velocity.
The greatest forced blackout in U.S. history, as this event has almost certainly become, was the result of a systemic and multifaceted failure. There are no promises of when power will be restored and little likelihood that the episode won’t be repeated in a corner of the country hard hit by climate change.
Francis’s peer-reviewed papers showed a fascinating phenomenon: That as the Arctic was getting warmer and warmer, the polar vortex was taking more and more drunken adventures down south.
These hall-monitor reporters are a major factor explaining why tech monopolies, which (for reasons of self-interest and ideology) never wanted the responsibility to censor, now do so with abandon and seemingly arbitrary blunt force: they are shamed by the world’s loudest media companies when they do not.
We grouped the most common mistakes into four categories: (1) mispricing on one side of the market, (2) failure to develop trust with users and partners, (3) prematurely dismissing the competition, and (4) entering too late.
I’ve written about Apple and Amazon’s organizational designs on various occasions, including Apple’s Organizational Crossroads and The Amazon Tax. What is fascinating is that the two companies are polar opposites of each other: Apple is extremely centralized and focused, befitting its obsession with being the best, while Amazon is extremely decentralized and independent, befitting its obsession with experimentation. It’s why Apple is known for multiple groundbreaking products, while Amazon is known for multiple groundbreaking businesses. I think, though, the fact they are so drastically different speaks to why Bezos and Jobs rank so highly as CEOs: the only way you end up on the extreme end of the organizational structure axis is via clear intent and purpose from the leader.
In an all-remote setting, where team members are empowered to live and work where they're most fulfilled, mastering asynchronous workflows is vital to avoiding dysfunction and enjoying outsized efficiencies. Increasingly, operating asynchronously is necessary even in colocated companies which have team members on various floors or offices, especially when multiple time zones are involved.
One of my favorite quotes is in the final book, when Harry asks Dumbledore, “Is this real or is all of this happening in my head?” And Dumbledore responds, __“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”__ For me, that quote is equally true of entrepreneurs who aren’t afraid to believe in the things that are happening in their head, and make them real.
When we try to change a person’s mind, our first impulse is to preach about why we’re right and prosecute them for being wrong. Yet experiments show that preaching and prosecuting typically backfire — and what doesn’t sway people may strengthen their beliefs. Much as a vaccine inoculates the physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future attempts at influence, making people more certain of their own opinions and more ready to rebut alternatives.