Jason Shen
@jasonshen
Exec coach helping founders and creative leaders rebound and reinvent so they do more of what matters most.
Jason Shen
Why Did We (The English) Start Using Surnames?
youtube.comWe only have surnames because of the Black Death
Microessay about how things take time by Justin Duke
https://x.com/jmduke/status/1788307295526338883
Things take time.
Nintendo fairly famously was born in 1889, and the modern incarnation - Yamamuchi Nintendo & Co., LTD - was established nearly fifty years later, in 1933. They spent forty years selling playing cards, then another decade operating merely as a distributor of electronics before coming out with their first piece of electronic hardware.
The Lego Group began in a Danish workshop in 1932; it took them 26 years until a confluence of technology, iteration, and luck led them to what we now refer to as a Lego. (Er, sorry - a Lego brick.)
Nike spent eight years merely re-selling (literally, not figuratively) Onitsuka shoes to a U.S. audience.
Gates and Allen ran Microsoft as what was essentially a freelance firm for eight years, too, before scoring a contract with IBM (and even that took an additional two years to be parlayed into MSDOS.)
(There are, of course, some companies that like Athena sprout fully-formed from the head of their creators - Amazon and TSMC come to mind.)
When we build hagiographies of the companies we love (or at least find most interesting), it can be tempting to draw clean, neat, satisfying arcs and fast forward through the boring eras that do not inform our modern understanding of those organizations.
But neither the Nike Cortez nor the Lego System 236 Garage with Automatic Door came from the first decade of either company's existence.
Part of success is staying alive long enough to have the right kinds of things happen to you all at once.
CHEAT SHEET on playing the Corporate Political Game.
If you’re planning on making a success of senior leadership in a large corporate, you will probably need to play the corporate political game.
Personally not fpr me, but this is a cheat sheet on how I would do it.... See more
tiktok.comEven if you don’t work in corporate, it helps to understand how people advance to the top
When It's Helpful to Think About the Worst-Case Scenario
psychologytoday.com
A lovely comic about a one-man pizza shop
"In addition, there are problems that humans rather than computers will have to solve for purely practical reasons. It isn’t because computers couldn’t eventually solve them. It’s because in real life, and especially in organizational life, we keep changing our conception of what the problem is and what our goals are."
— Geoff Colvin, Humans Are
... See moreJason Shen • 131: How to Be Human in the Age of Generative AI
when we first started @readwise, all i did for the first summer was write personalized cold emails to anyone who'd expressed pain around their Kindle highlights online
it was grueling, rejection-laden work, but in July 2017 we celebrated our first "best day ever":
the inimitable @craigmod... See more
Things that don’t scale for Readwise growth
Your ads are saying, “look, I’m don’t have Porsche’s speed or Chevrolet’s muscles. I’m not as sexy as Mercedes-Benz and I’m not as classy as Cadillac. I’ll never be as patriotic as Ford because I’m German to the core. I know what I am…and I’m proud of it. I’m not made to be shown off, I’m made to be functional: my purpose is to get you from point A... See more
Embrace your weaknesses
Seven Surprises for New CEOs
hbr.org
Really good HBR article about tough lessons for new CEOs of bigger companies (2004 but still very relevant)