I lead Organizational Design at Airbnb. Previously: August, Undercurrent.
Remember Commander’s Intent? Basically: a nugget of communicable strategy that helps a team make effective decisions in the face of changing conditions. It’s primarily a military thing, but since we use words like “campaign” a lot (whatup, Cannes?) I think we’re allowed to continue our appropriation of
There’s a lot of back-and-forth on the internet about the value of banners, the value of social, and whether or not it’s a good idea generally to advertise on the internet. I’m not sure where we’ll all come down on this – ultimately I think
Numerical weather modeling splits up the globe into a series of three-dimensional pixels. It applies a ton of math to the data representing each of those pixels to make predictions about the movement, intensity and impact of weather systems. These predictions are generated by specific models developed by groups
From the chronicles of “Easier Said Than Done, Airline Edition”: five lessons on innovation and the future of organizing.
Lots of interesting stuff lately on the internet about food. The first is from the trailing end of a meandering piece on The Awl about a “McWorld” in Times Square. The author is suggesting the eponymous fast-food giant build a Disneyland/Mecca for Big Mac lovers in NYC, with
Guess the source of this slide; Empathy; Seinfeld on Jokecraft; Flight Manual for the U2; Interestingness defined.
I give you another military process that can be applied to business strategy and organization design. It’s called "Commander’s Intent" (CI) and it’s designed to create durability through simplicity and openness to interpretation: "Plans are useful, in the sense that they are proof that
Examining the ways in which structure changes what gets published, and why
Last week, my lovely and talented colleague Vlad wrote about three steps to eliminate/mitigate risks in strategy – understand, assess, neutralize – and offered a chart that caught my eye. Vlad adapted a piece of HBR chartery that was fundamentally similar to a Boris Cube, something used by aerospace engineers to
Looking at connectedness is interesting. For a post on Undercurrent’s Theory blog, I’m looking at the emailing habits of colleagues as a proxy for the connectedness between people. Every pixel in line width represents 100 emails sent/received between two people. Darker nodes represent individuals that have been
If you’re reading this, you know that digital technology has changed things. You know that in a single year, humans create more information than they have in all of history up to that point. You know that your customers are inundated with more information than their brains can handle.
High-quality strategies in ecosystems offer four things: loud feedback; flexibility in acceptable outcomes; shared indicators for failure and success; recognized connection points.
Type to search posts, essays, and chapters.
