DPL Reading List – September 23, 2016
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Bad Writing Is Destroying Your Company’s Productivity – “Requiring clear, direct, active language has two benefits. It forces writers to think through what they really mean and the arguments they can use to support it. And it makes smart people stand out. If you prize clarity, the clear thinkers will rise to the top.”
The Trouble with Trying to Win at Everything (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “Relationships — whether they’re at work or at home — aren’t about winning and losing. Nor are they about being right and being wrong. They’re about figuring out what will work to achieve the goals you care about. Relationships are built not won.”
Extracting Insights from Vast Stores of Data – “The insights from data emerge from having a laser focus on a business problem rather than from taking shots in the dark in the hope of uncovering a hidden truth. Sure, there are scenarios where data patterns that are discovered by chance yield insight, but most of the benefit from data comes from pursuing well-defined problems.”
Entrepreneurship is a Calling not a Job – “Both founders and entrepreneurial employees prefer to build something from the ground up rather than join an existing company. Like jazz musicians or improv actors, they prefer to operate in a chaotic environment with multiple unknowns. They sense the general direction they’re headed in, OK with uncertainty and surprises, using the tools at hand, along with their instinct to achieve their vision. These types of people are rare, unique and crazy. They’re artists.”
Missed Connections (Thanks to Jarrod Wubbels for recommending this article) – “If you’re a client at the point of evaluating multiple designers/vendors, you’ve already given a lot of thought to your project and probably have a pretty strong idea of what you’re looking for in a partner. You’re looking for confirmation. Not surprise.”
Resilience Is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure – “The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems. And lack of recovery — whether by disrupting sleep with thoughts of work or having continuous cognitive arousal by watching our phones — is costing our companies $62 billion a year (that’s billion, not million) in lost productivity.”
Machine Learning in a Year – “The truth is you don’t need much maths to get started with machine learning, and you don’t need a degree to use it professionally.”
