Andrei Stoica

A lot of times I allowed FLORA to just let it rip, and even if I hated the outcome → it gave me a thing to edit. So often in creative work, momentum is the name of the game, and FLORA really shaped my sense of pace to keep pushing towards an end state rather than getting lost in decision paralysis of how I should prompt what’s going to be a throwaw... See more

No amount of trend research will help if findings are not integrated much earlier in the strategy process.

What so many organizations get wrong about marketing today is that they treat foresight, cultural intelligence and social listening as downstream efforts.

Too often, every single day, we attempt to map already finalized products to a mismatched ... See more

The only value of cultural ideas is their ability to inform action in this true world. And because mass communication about complex new ideas is impossible, whatever ideas you have can only directly affect your own actions and those of your collaborators. This is the discipline of materialism. If you want anything of true excellence done, don’t bot... See more

The cab had begun to grind its way up towards the brow of a hill with audible, Sisyphean difficulty. I mumbled something about whether we were going to have to get out. “We’ll make it,” Cowen said firmly. He was talking about how he liked to play basketball at a court near his house. He didn’t mind playing with other people, but most days he was th... See more

• There are all kinds of wrinkles and complications that affect trade, called “ frictions ”. These include things like home bias in both consumption and financial investing, sovereign default, currency market frictions, and so on. Economists argue back and forth about which of these frictions cause the various “puzzles” in international trade — disco

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To these three, I’ll add my favorite new idea as a fourth: contraptionism. So that’s the 4Cs of the imperative: Courage, Clarity, Creativity, Contraptionism.

The aesthetic and ethos that we need to guide the construction of a new machine is contraptionism . Because any new societal machine will inevitably be a janky affair, not just at inception, bu... See more

I often draw a distinction between the political elites of Washington DC and the industrial elites of Silicon Valley with a joke: in San Francisco reading books, and talking about what you have read, is a matter of high prestige. Not so in Washington DC. In Washington people never read books—they just write them.