Remainders: From Supply Chains to Stephen Hawking

I’ve set (what I originally thought was) a reasonably modest goal for myself of writing 10 blog posts in April. Two more to go with one week left. Thanks for following along and please let me know what you think. Also, you can now subscribe to the blog by email. Sign up here. Alright alright alright. Quick status check for me: Spent the week out in SF for Percolate's Transition Conference where I gave a talk about how to use supply chain thinking and the Theory of Constraints to deal with the content marketing bottleneck (I'll share the video when it gets online). We'll be in London in early June, so if you're around and interested in coming please reach out. I just finished the book Soldiers of Reason which is about the history of the RAND Corporation (I've got a half-written post I'll try to get out about it). I'm taking a break from game theory and nuclear warfare with Andy Weir's new book Artemis (which I haven't heard was great, but I liked The Martian a lot and my library hold came through the day I finished the other book). Now onto the links. The biggest story in advertising was Martin Sorrell's departure from WPP, the largest holding company in the world. I spent a little time on Twitter looking back into the commentary around his original takeover of Wire & Plastic Products. The highlight: The company still makes wine racks. Speaking of Wire & Plastic Products, here's the history of the shopping cart, an under-appreciated invention. On a more serious tip, The New Yorker had my favorite profile of Sorrell. For what it's worth, I met him once or twice and emailed with him a few times and my takeaway were a) he knows his company and the ad industry inside out, b) he emailed me back immediately, and c) he was a good performer (it was a lot of fun to watch him interview folks on stage and make them wiggle a bit, especially media owners). Two really excellent long-form pieces from this week:

1. Wired on a group of video game hackers who took things too far.
2. The Verge on the mostly failed One Laptop Per Child experiment (I've still got one somewhere around the house)

Matt Haughey (who, amongst other things, started one of my favorite sites Metafilter) wrote about his experience trying to recreate just one custom prop from Beyonce's Lemonade as a way to illustrate her incredible attention to detail. If you want to get a jump-start on my post about RAND, here's an article from a few years ago by the author which covers many of the pertinent points (one of the amazing RAND facts is that they've had over 30 Nobel laureates as either employees or advisors in their ~70 years of existence). A few weeks ago I shared an excellent Planet Money video about why Coke cost a nickel for 70 years. Well, here's another about the economics of graveyards: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYDYDThuJe4[/embed] While we're on videos, here's one from Vox on China's Belt and Road Initiative. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvXROXiIpvQ&feature=youtu.be[/embed] Continuing with the audio/visual theme, the best podcast episode I listened to this week exponent from a few weeks ago on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook, I'm skeptical Zuckerberg doesn't know what's going on with the ad business as Wired suggests. The guy is very smart and runs a giant company who makes the vast majority of its money from advertising, I'd be pretty shocked if he just doesn't know what's going on as suggested (emphasis mine):

That isn’t to say the hearings went over perfectly, even at home. One mystifying thing to employees was that Zuckerberg frequently seemed to come up short when asked for details about the advertising business. When pressed by Roy Blunt (R-Missouri)—who, Zuckerberg restrained himself from pointing out, was a client of Cambridge Analytica—Facebook’s CEO couldn’t specify whether Facebook tracks users across their computing devices or tracks offline activity. He seemed similarly mystified about some of the details about the data Facebook collects about people. In total, Zuckerberg promised to follow up on 43 issues; many of the most straight-ahead ones were details on how the ad business works. It’s possible, of course, that Zuckerberg dodged the questions because he didn’t want to talk about Facebook’s tracking on national TV. It seemed more likely to some people on the inside, however, that he genuinely didn’t know.

My favorite headline this week: Someone Convince Me That an iPhone Wallet Case Isn't the Dumbest Idea in the World. The Register had a good primer on the current economics of bug bounty programs. The always smart Tim Harford wrote about what made Stephen Hawking great. I particularly liked this bit, "First, he did not patronise his audience: presenting the most complicated ideas was a sign that he respected our intelligence. If we did not grasp everything, we would still be better off for having tried." I have thought about this a lot in building Percolate, both internally and externally. It's always been important to me to assume your audience is brilliant and work from there. At Transition over the years we've had talks on how cities grow like biological organisms, promise theory, and whether humans will follow the path of bacteria and hit the edge of the petri dish and die. The positive feedback I got on the most complex topics (told well) was always huge. Finally, I wrote about The New Yorker, basketball, and the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect earlier in the week and last week I wrote a piece about the idea of an information fiduciary and how it might be a good way to think about regulating Facebook. And, of course, here's the Remainders post from last week. Thanks for everything and have a great weekend.