Weekly Pulse is a content curation and highlights from readings, books, videos, podcasts, insights, ramblings and other interesting things I discovered and digested during the last week.
So, let's go with some discoveries from the week!
#1 - When Machine Learning Goes Off the Rails
#2 - The Rules of Co-opetition
#3 - The New New Product Development Game
#4 - I’m not languishing, I’m dormant
#5 - What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others
#6 - Understanding Business Agility
#7 - Book Notes: The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
When Machine Learning Goes Off the Rails
Source: Harvard Business ReviewAuthor: Boris Babic, I. Glenn Cohen, Theodoros Evgeniou and Sara Gerke
Year: 2021
Summary: Machine learning can go wrong in a number of ways. A key question executive must answer is whether it’s better to allow smart offerings to continuously evolve or to “lock” their algorithms and periodically update them. In addition, every offering will need to be appropriately tested before and after rollout and regularly monitored to make sure it’s performing as intended.
3 Highlights:
"... Businesses will need to establish their own guidelines, including ethical ones, to manage these new risks—as some companies, like Google and Microsoft, have already done..."
"... As machine-learning-based products and services and the environments they operate in evolve, companies may find that their technologies don’t perform as initially intended..."
"... Just as cognitive testing of employees won’t reveal how they’ll do when added to a preexisting team in a business, laboratory testing cannot predict the performance of machine-learning systems in the real world...."
The Rules of Co-opetition
Source: Harvard Business ReviewAuthor: Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuff
Year: 2021
Summary: In this article two professors who helped introduce the approach offer a framework for deciding whether to team up with a rival, drawing on examples from Apple and Samsung, DHL and UPS, Ford and GM, and Google and Yahoo. Their advice: Start by analyzing what each party will do if it chooses not to cooperate and how that will affect industry dynamics
3 Highlights:
"... getting the right mindset requires choosing the right people..."
"... Cooperation with rivals also has an important emotional aspect. Some people are comfortable with the idea that there can be multiple winners, and some are not. As a result, co-opetition may end up being a strategy of last resort even in cases where it should be the first resort..."
"... There are many reasons for competitors to cooperate. At the simplest level, it can be a way to save costs and avoid duplication of effort..."
The New New Product Development Game
Source: Harvard Business ReviewAuthor: Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka
Year: 1986
Summary: Sometimes it is great to come back to the classics to remember the basis of what we are discussing today. And this one by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka from 1986, is referenced a lot by the Scrum community as a primary inspiration.
3 Highlights:
"... A project team consisting of members with varying functional specializations, thought processes, and behavior patterns carries out new product development..."
"... The project teams appear to be absorbed in a never-ending quest for “the limit..."
"... We observed an equally strong drive on the part of the project members to transfer their learning to others outside the group..."
I’m not languishing, I’m dormant
Source: Austin Kleon BlogAuthor: Austin Kleon
Year: 2021
Summary: Recently we were talking about the mood of last year: languishing. But Austin Kleon has another point here about that feeling, considering that he disliked the term “languishing” the minute he heard it.
3 Highlights:
"... To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven..."
"... I’m not languishing because I’m not trying to flourish..."
"... I may even look dead, but like Corita Kent once described one of her own dormant periods, “new things are happening very quietly inside of me..."
What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others
Source: Harvard Business ReviewAuthor: Robert C. Pozen and Kevin Downey
Year: 2019
Summary: Would you rate yourself as highly productive? We’ve learned a lot about personal productivity and what makes some people more productive than others. But how we can compare the productivity of senior and juniors professional? Or even compare men with women?
3 Highlights:
"... working longer hours does not necessarily mean higher personal productivity..."
"... we found that professionals with the highest productivity scores tended to do well on the same clusters of habits..."
"... we found the higher productivity scores for Europe, Asia, and Australia were driven by strong habits in areas such as daily schedules, not constantly checking messages, focusing early on the final product, and thinking carefully before reading or writing...."
Understanding Business Agility
Source: William Meller - New article by Rafael CaloviSummary: Business Agility is the ability to compete and thrive in the digital age by quickly responding to market changes with innovative, digitally-enabled business solutions. In this brilliant article by Rafael Calovi.
3 Highlights:
"... But let me tell you: there’s a good reason for the word ‘Business’ in Business Agility and you don’t need to scale agile teams to achieve it..."
"... If you still believe that “a System is the sum of its parts”, then what if I handed to you the parts below and say: here’s a pocket watch. Can you tell me what time is it even though you have all the parts?..."
"... From a Lean perspective, we should now focus on creating a strategy that will promote Flow Efficiency in our Value Stream by continuously addressing existing bottlenecks, eliminating activities that do not contribute to the generation of Value and looking for alternatives to reduce (and possibly eliminate) wait times such as the need for external approvals or handovers..."
Book Notes: The Lean Startup - Eric Ries
Source: William Meller - Book NotesEric Ries develops all the concepts of The Lean Startup methodology in order to radically increase the chances of success for all those who wish to start their own business or develop a new project through continuous innovation.
The solution, according to this book, is the lean thinking and validated learning. Rather than designing an elaborate business plan and committing large amounts of financial and human resources from the start, first find out what you can about your potential customers. And rather than adopting a static, product-centric approach, test your idea on your customers: respond to their feedback, and constantly be prepared to adjust your product, as well as your business.
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