Recently, March 2024
Reading
This month, I finished Richard Rumelt’s latest book on strategy: The Crux. As someone who has wasted a lot of time in typical mission/vision/purpose so-called “strategy” sessions (and even facilitated a fair number of them myself), I’ve come to deeply appreciate Rumelt’s pragmatic and pointed perspective on what actually constitutes good strategy.
The Crux is a follow-up to Rumelt’s earlier Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and while it is good, it’s not as good as the predecessor. That said, I really appreciated the final chapter, where Rumelt elaborates on the specifics of running what he calls a “Strategy Foundry,” a multi-day workshop where he leads business leaders through constructing and writing a good, working strategy. This is the kind of practical content I felt was missing in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, and I’m glad Rumelt covered it in the follow-up.
I revisited Technopoly, a book I first read many years ago, but didn’t fully appreciate Postman’s insight the way I do today. With all the hype around generative AI in tech, Technopoly is still as relevant as ever.
Relatedly, Alan Jacob’s From Tech Critique to Ways of Living was a deep (albeit somewhat academic) exploration of everything I’ve often felt but could never explain when it comes to what I’ve often perceived as the frustrating futility of critique coming from the likes of Postman and his contemporaries—Illich, Mumford, Ellul, McLuhan, etc. It’s also one of those articles with plenty of citations that left me with a long list of follow-up reading.
Are We Watching the Internet Die? discusses the enshittification of the internet at the hands of generative AI, which is increasingly rendering it more and more useless as we stuff it full of generated content of little to no value, accelerated by generative models being trained on the same garbage they are regurgitating. As Ed Zitron writes:
We’re watching the joint hyper-scaling and hyper-normalization of the internet, where all popular content begins to look the same to appeal to algorithms run by companies obsessed with growth … This isn’t a situation where these automated tools are giving life to new forms of art or interesting new concepts, but regurgitations of an increasingly less unique internet, because these models are trained on data drawn from the internet.
Listening
I started listening to Acquired, and the episode on Costco is excellent. I spent many a Saturday of my early-90s youth wandering the aisles of Costco with my dad, painstakingly navigating extra-wide carts through crowded aisles, my soccer cleats click-clacking away on the warehouse’s polished concrete floors. I have a kind of love-hate relationship with the place.
Like most Acquired episodes, the one on Costco is long (3+ hours) but well worth a listen if you’re into business strategy or simply curious about how Costco’s unique operations. Thoroughly researched, full of interesting twists and turns and facts about the company’s history and what makes Costco, well, Costco.
Watching
The choreography in this video by Netherlands-based CDK for Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used To Know” is astonishingly precise and mesmerizing. So good.
Tools
I stumbled on Utopia.fyi’s fluid type calculator at the perfect moment. It proved invaluable in helping me finally get around to updating the typography on this site using responsive scaling via CSS clamp. While I enjoy the whole “personal site as worry stone” philosophy, I don’t have much time right now for a lot of stone polishing. So the typography update is a small change—perhaps barely noticeable—but something I’ve been meaning to improve for a while.