Interstellar jets of gas and dust more than 9,000 light years away.. More on the NASA Photo of the Day.
This post is part of a series I started after reading “Notice, Collect, Share” by Russell Davies. I’m more inspired than ever to get back into the habit of…noticing, collecting and sharing. As part of that return to habit, I’m going to try and find five things that interest me every week, and share them here on my blog. 5 things per week, for 20 weeks, equals 100 Interesting things. Maybe one of these things will inspire you. Maybe one of them will inspire me. We’ll all learn something along the way.
I’ve also been tracking all of the stuff I find in my “Deck Of Interesting” - it’s screenshots, links, and assorted notes of things that might make into one of these posts.
UPDATE: I’m a bit off my usual cadence of posting here. Vacation, changing jobs, and a 13-month old son will always get in the way of posting.
$61-66 Science-Fiction is inherently political, and it’s not about the future, but about the time it was written. It took me a long time to understand that: When I read Starship Troopers for the first time, I thought “Wow, rad, they’re fightin’ bugs in powered armor! Rad as hell.” It wasn’t until I was older that I understood some of the actual messaging. And since then, I think a lot of sci-fi has shaped who I am as a person and my own political beliefs. Likely for the worse from reading too much Heinlein, but likely for the better for being obssesed with Robinson and Le Guin later in life.
#62 Strategy Is About Logic, Not Data Roger Martin’s Medium posts are always well-written, dense, direct, arrogant, and thoughtful.
His latest is all of the above, and I like the point he makes about strategy here, and the importance of asking “What if…””
Choosing strategy is about competing logics not about competing data. We have no data about the future, so the data can never demonstrate that we should do one thing rather than another thing going forward — though data driven (self-proclaimed) strategists consistently make this error. Rather, creating the future is about imagining possibilities and choosing the one for which the most compelling logical argument can be made, as Aristotle argued 2500 years ago. And that is the essence of strategy.
Am I allowed to include Roger Martin emails/posts in this list on subsequent weeks, or does that ruin the purpose of broadening my horizons? Oh well - - they’re always pretty good.
#63 The Importance Of Hospitality For the past few years I’ve been cultivating a hunch that the the agency of the future that wins will be the one that understands they are truly in the customer service business, not the ad/strategy/content creation business. The ability to meet with and deal with clients is becoming a lost art.
Fortunately, there are people like Trina Boos to remind us of the importance of workplace hospitality.
#64 The Truth In Satire A few months ago, I wrote here that we would start finding ways to inject humanity into our work to demonstrate it was hand- (not AI-) crafted. LinkedIn prankster Ken Cheng puts it into practice:
#65 The Evolution Of the Alpha Aesthetic I’ve learned more about the history of fashion, what makes a good suit, the politics of global trade, and a history of class divisions and divides from following Derek Guy “The Suit Guy” on social media than I thought was possible.
His latest essay on Bloomberg is a cultural deep-dive into the history of masculinity and how fashion helped us end up where we are today:
This new wave of hypercurated masculinity is a backlash against a cultural landscape shaped by gender fluidity, body positivity and an ongoing renegotiation of gender roles. As celebrities like Harry Styles and Lil Nas X pose in dresses and blur the traditional lines between masculine and feminine, another current rushes in to reassert the old order. It pulls from earlier models: The mythic strength of Sandow, the beachside bravado of the Venice bodybuilders, the greed-soaked tailoring of 1980s finance and the tight-fitting clothes once labeled metrosexual. Today’s fixation on muscularity, discipline and traditional masculine aesthetics feels like a new chapter in that same historical cycle.
Better late than never. Join For a real miscellany of presentation advice and sci-fi.