Ten years ago I spoke at a Marketing Technology (aka “martech”) event that was held at the fancy New York Times auditorium; a famous Harvard economist was the keynote speaker.
Although his remarks weren’t long, they certainly made an impression on me. I’ve held onto what he said and have tried to find the source material for the points he raised, with no success. It went something like this (please excuse my paraphrasing that is likely not proper Harvard economist-speak):
Imagine you are the greatest country in the world. You can manufacture and deliver any kind or size of object…
This post is dedicated to my mother, Yumi, who always told me throughout my life, “I believe in you.” It always made a difference.
My mom was always busy running the tofu store with my father, and as a big fan of Elvis she always wanted to keep tabs on his latest resurrection from the grave. So whenever she rushed through the shopping line at the supermarket, that’s when she would pick up her newspaper. As a result, I developed a strong interest in Bigfoot, UFOs, and of course the Loch Ness Monster.
When I later left for college I…
I think we’re all feeling a bit dumbfounded by how we took the feeling of safety for granted before the pandemic. That odd sensation you get when watching a movie where nobody’s wearing a mask in a dense crowd is real. Or, at least for me, the newest member of my “unfavorite dreams” circus — the one where I can’t graduate from high school, the one where all my teeth fall out — is now the one where I’m exposed to some terribly deadly virus. It’s a vulnerable time for many of us. …
SXSW is in March 2021 and so the annual CX.Report is coming soon …
That became particularly obvious to me when I bumped into a collection of my old “design-isms” over on my main site, design.co. There’s a list of my design tweets from the early days of Twitter, before anybody really cared about Twitter too much.
Back in the 00s, there weren’t a lot of @people on Twitter, so it was a productive karaoke mike for me to test out ideas in what I felt was a safe place. But it’s changed as a place to publicly experiment, and…
“And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of…
If you look in a conventional dictionary, the definition of “digitalization” reads:
“Digitalization: The act or process of converting from analog to digital.”
— Wordnik
And for “digitization” it reads:
“Digitization: The conversion of data or information from analog to digital or binary.”
— Wordnik
So if you grow up in the normal world where dictionaries matter, you’re not going to immediately make a distinction between the two words. However, if you’re in the management consultancy space, there’s a certain utility in refining the meaning of these two words to have different meanings. …
Throughout my cheese journey, I came upon the fact that French bakeries carry two kinds of baguettes that look identical but are fundamentally different in composition because of the type of yeast used in each. One is called pain au levain and the other is called pain à la levure. I was taught this easy tourist-y mnemonic for remembering the difference between the two: the former ends in “n” and that means “natural yeast.” The latter means “chemical yeast” which is a more common approach today.
I mean, they’re both just loaves of bread. …
This fact never struck me as noteworthy until I moved from Seattle to Boston for college, and I happened to have classmates who wanted to touch my hair. The common reaction was always, “It feels like a brush!” It’s the kind of thing that I, literally, just brushed off. I also had a roommate who begged to know what I put in my hair to make it do that. When I told him it’s genetic, he wasn’t satisfied and often rifled through my toiletries to locate the secret. Poor fella.
If you look back at the history of computer graphics…
Since Google seems to know everything, I took that initial prompt to lightly dive into these four areas that are of interest to me. I hope they’re of interest to you, and do keep in mind that I’ve editorialized what I’ve read online — so I may have gotten the trend wrong. So trend-grab wisely :+).
Fast Company gathered expert opinions that cover a broad range that I summarize as follows:
You see, learning is a passion of mine. And I find that some things are harder to learn than others unless you really get your head in the game, which is especially hard when you have a full-time job. I reasoned that if paying for a gym membership can be a motivator to go to the gym, I needed to locate a paid way to learn WTF “digital transformation” means. I’d come into contact with it via the management consultant world and it was bugging me that I hadn’t found a crisp meaning. So I splurged on an MIT-branded experience…