A great conversation over the new year got me thinking about the types of consumption that we have, as individuals. There is a kind of spending and investment of time that is really about improving our productivity and career outcomes: training, reading in certain areas, buying tools, and spending on enabling technologies like cars or personal task trackers. 

I can’t really do any justice to Jenny Odell’s great piece in the New York Times about a bizarre network of ventures, so if you (like me) didn’t see it when it came out, please go read. 

Part of the larger social contract forged over the 20th century was a set of a benefits: unemployment insurance, healthcare, workers compensation, and paid time off for vacation or for illness.

The Kirkpatrick Learning model helps with evaluating the effectiveness of training. It proposes evaluating at four levels: 

There are quite a few organizational maturity levels, but I’ve generally found them either too specific to a certain domain, or too speculative to apply properly. I recently read a Miller Heiman Group publication that included the one they have developed for sales enablement processes. It seemed to strike the right mix between practicality and useful, and I’ve found it helpful in getting an orientation on a few process-related questions.

Churn is, generally, seen as a bad thing within an organization - teams wants stability and predictability. These help make the organization more legible, and they are part of generating the feelings of psychological safety and mutual trust that are needed for groups to be effective. Churn also produces work which does not feel productive: recruiting, staffing, training and so on. 

At the end of his Patterns of Conflict briefing, Boyd talks about how grand strategy is centered around maintaining and improving our adaptability to change. 

Interesting post and comment thread on Arnold Kling’s blog about construction productivity being higher in the Great Depression. 

Financial portfolio theory has the idea that owning too much of a particular stock is bad as it exposes you to greater company-specific risk, which unlike systemic risk is not generally compensated for by higher returns (assuming investors are demanding proper risk premiums etc.) This leaves room for a particular kind of human error: you have to sell things which are doing well, as they come to represent a greater proportion of your portfolio that is optimal. This is emotionally difficult. 

How do you compete with AWS? Even if you set your sights a little lower in the cloud infrastructure space, does Azure, Google Cloud Platform or Aliyun look much easier? These are big companies with a lot of money, a lot of engineers and a lot of infrastructure. They also have a suite of existing cloud services, letting them act as a “one stop shop” for customers.