Reading – Perspectives

[Link] Big Break

Little breaks are easy to ignore and thus are wasted.

[Link] McKinsey on Stress

Even the big consulting firms are posting more about stress, with fancy graphs & charts!

At the core of this challenge for many people is a misguided view of stress itself, which contributes to our inability to recognize and manage it. Many executives view stress as an unalloyed negative, something to fight through or minimize.2 As a result, they may manage it ineffectively.

[Link]: Fight to Be Who Philosophy Wants You to Be

Ryan Halliday on the reality of life:

..we will fall short. We all will. The important thing is that we pick ourselves back up when we do. As one Japanese proverb says: fall down seven times, get up eight. Marcus (Aurelius) said it too. “When jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances,” he wrote, “revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep on going back to it.” You’re going to have an impulse to give in. Your temper is going to get the best of you. Fear will get the best of you. Ambition might lead you astray. But you always have the ability to realize that that is not who you want to be, that is not what you were put here to do, that is not who your philosophy wants you to be.

[Link] How to tell if someone is a serious data analyst

Kaiser Fung opines, in the context of all the analysis re CoVID-19 vaccines :

The key lesson is if you don’t have experimental data, the data analysis gets a lot more complex (more stimulating, but also fraught with risk). The analyst must release full details of the analysis; otherwise, it’s impossible to evaluate its merit.

[Link] Their apps tracked them

In the hands of law enforcement, this data could be evidence. But at every other moment, the location data is reviewed by hedge funds, financial institutions and marketers, in an attempt to learn more about where we shop and how we live.

This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.

Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson show , in this NYTimes Opinion piece, how insidiously apps leak information, whether users know it or not

[Link] The Vanishing Middle Manager, McKinsey

A perspective worth considering: what should middle management actually be doing?

Think of the role of the direct manager in performance management. Ultimately, it’s not about the system. It’s not about the form. It’s about whether your direct manager helps you understand the value of your work and how it fits into a broader strategy. It’s about coaching. It’s about real-time feedback delivered by a human. I think we’ve undervalued those elements, tried to systematize them away with data, with systems, with tools. Meanwhile, workers are asking for better leaders, better apprenticeships, better coaching. When we try to disintermediate the role of a good midlevel leader, I think we do this at our peril.

[Link] Fred Wilson on Learning From Your Mistakes

Fred Wilson makes the point in a short blog post:

There will always be new mistakes to make. It is best not to repeat the ones you’ve already made.

[Link] Dead Cat Trampoline by Wendy Grossman

Ms. Grossman, writing about Gamestop’s fall, rise & fall & fall & …:

In the long term, fundamentals *should* matter. because the value of having the market in the first place isn’t to make people rich but to help channel investment to viable businesses. If it doesn’t fulfill that function it’s time for real reform.

[Link] Lessons from Gian-carlo Rota Indiscrete Thoughts

HT FS Blog, 10 Lessons of an MIT Education:

Lesson Five: You don’t have to be a genius to do creative work.

The idea of genius elaborated during the Romantic Age (late 18th and 19th centuries) has done harm to education. It is demoralizing to give a young person role models of Beethoven, Einstein, and Feynman, presented as saintly figures who moved from insight to insight without a misstep. Scientific biographies often fail to give a realistic description of personality, and thereby create a false idea of scientific work.

[Link] How to make the world better, not perfect

Prof Max Bazerman’s book “Better, Not Perfect“:

Bazerman’s guiding light is the philosophy of utilitarianism, which teaches the goal of creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people. But he tempers that with the principle of “maximum sustainable goodness,” a term he coined based on the environmental concept of “maximal sustainable yield”—that is, the amount of goodness that a person can achieve over time without depleting their ability to do good in the future.