DPL Reading List – November 17, 2017
Here are some of the articles we’ve been reading around this office this week.
Why IBM Created Its Own Typeface After A Century Without One – “Last week, the company finally debuted its own typeface: IBM Plex, which is designed to be used almost everywhere letters appear in the IBM universe. Think of it as the company’s “next” Helvetica.”
Thinking Like An Entrepreneur Leads to Corporate And Customer Victories – “As leaders and others adopted Lean Startup, though, the culture began changing. Little says, “just by thinking differently, we acted differently.” Product lead times were reduced. In 2013, GE tasked a team with creating a new french door refrigerator model in just three months, with a final production-ready product in less than a year. Within a year, the team completed the process — a feat that historically took up to five years.”
For Amazon, The Future Of Alexa Is About The End Of The Smartphone Era – “With touch-screen devices like the Echo Show and Echo Spot, Amazon is trying to upend a decade of smartphones, notifications, and apps.”
CEOs Should Think Like Founders, Not Just Managers – “In order to refound their organizations, CEOs must be strong and bold and use their influence to reset the permissions and boundaries of their teams to work and think differently. Without these changes, efforts to reignite growth capabilities at large enterprises will ultimately collapse back into big-company thinking and consensus-driven risk aversion.”
Do You Know How Haptics Work? – ““Haptic feedback” (or just “haptics”) is the application of forces, vibrations, and motions to help recreate the sense of touch for the user when interacting with a given piece of technology. Haptic technology is often associated with the buzzes and clicks of our smartphone alerts, notifications, and the subtle way they give us feedback as we interact with the device.”
Why You Should Always Carry a Notebook – “I can personally trace every creative project I’ve worked on, whether it’s a blog post, book chapter, or book to the pages of one of my moleskine notebooks. The discipline of capturing your ideas significantly increases the likelihood that you’ll follow through on them. My notebooks and my pens are essential tools in my creative process.”
The Startup Guru Who Wants Everyone to Think Like a Founder – “Borrowing ideas from agile software development and lean manufacturing, Ries’s book found its own [product-market fit], and it kicked off a movement that’s still working its way through the tech industry. Now the author is back with a follow-up book, The Startup Way, aimed at propagating lean startup thinking inside General Electric-size corporations, government institutions, and nonprofit organizations that covet Silicon Valley-style nimbleness.”
