Hi nerds -
I salute you from Panama City, where I've been going through the regular check-ups from doctors.
How our bodies feel is always a reaction to our actions, whether it’s the food we eat, the medicines we consume, the habits we keep, our the stress we carry - nothing happens “just because”.
Healthy old people are healthy young people. It’s never too late to wear skin care, work out, chill more, and eat our veggies.
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🗑 Flat and fluid: When it’s everyone’s responsibility to take out the trash, the trash is never taken out.
Ownership and accountability is leadership, even when that leadership doesn’t translate into hierarchy.
As we progressively decentralize organizations, moving away from hierarchical structures into flat, fluid teams is a challenge that often ends back in centralization.
Organically, people who take ownership over initiative and hold people accountable are the ones who end up leading the organizations.
✨ T-Algorithm: NYU Professor, Scott Galloway, set out to study the strategies implemented by trillion-dollar firms.
Here a TL;DR on the best business strategies:
- Rundle: Implementing a recurrent revenue bundle, where users receive a bundle of value for the price of a single subscription. Ex: Amazon Prime.
- Likeability: Having likeable leaders attracts top talent. Ex: Sheryl Sandberg or Tim Cook.
- Accelerant: Acting as an accelerant to people’s careers. They elevate top talent quickly by creating a true meritocracy and moving senior people out of the organization when needed. Ex: McKinsey.
- Human instinct: Appealing to a core human instinct, like the brain, heart, gut, or genitals. Ex: Toyota.
- Vertical integration: Controlling multiple parts of the value chain, from product design and manufacturing to distribution. Ex: Apple.
- Visionary storytelling: Articulating a bold vision and consistently demonstrating progress against that bold vision. Ex: Tesla.
- Growth x Margins: Having both explosive growth as well as strong margins - two categories that had been traditionally contradictory until the internet era. Ex: Amazon.
- Benjamin Button: Generate products that age in reverse and create more, rather than less valuable, each time they’re used thanks to its network-effect. Ex: Waze, Twitter, Airbnb.
A great example of an org that implements many of these strategies is Y Combinator. Here’s a YC deep dive.
👩🏻🏫 Online education: Effective online courses usually have 3 main components:
- P2P learning: A student’s openness to learn is directly correlated to the 1:1 relationships in the group. Fun, casual environments, where people respect and trust each other, are effective because we’re “learning with” rather than “learning from”.
- Context: Real-world examples & metaphors help students understand why they’re learning what they’re learning. This makes them double as likely to care, ergo information is more likely to stay longer-term.
- Skin in the game: Through project-based learning, students inevitable compare the current experience with previous work they’ve done, leading to an increase in content retention and insight.
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“Leaders are just the person who knows what to do next”
~ said by someone on a random Discord server
“The amount of money you can make is theoretically infinite, while the amount of money you can save is capped.”
~ spoken at a groundw3rk meeting
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Today’s song comes with its YouTube video because it’s that good.
If you liked the movie Grease, this song will take you back in time with a modern splash.
Thanks for reading.
I will be in Athens, Madrid, Berlin, and Paris during July. Anyone I should meet?
Hit reply and would love to connect! 🌎
Best,
Jules 🤸🏻♂️