In 2003 LEGO was $800m in debt. But by 2015 they had $1billion+ in sales. What was at the heart of such a crazy comeback?

Patterns.

LEGO did a mountain of research... and found patterns in how children play.

As their then-CEO said - "If you want to understand how animals live, you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle."

So they talked to Lego fans.... See more

I’ve recently been exploring the metaphor of work as trace – that it isn’t so much about what we put out into the world as how we put it out; that the thing we really ought to care about, the thing that ultimately matters, is the intention from which the work emerges. The rest is all mirror, representation, resemblance.

"You can choose to sleepwalk through life and accept the path that's been laid out for you. You can choose to accept the world as it is. But you don't have to. If there's something in the world you feel is wrong, and you have a vision for what a better world could be, you can find your guiding principle, and fight for a cause."

In the high modernist world we live in, we can adapt Drucker’s dictum that “whatever is measured improves” to a more true-to-reality, but less elegant “whatever is legible improves, unless there are second-order consequences which undermine or destroy the original intention.”

Elsewhere in Kyoto is another shinise company that isn’t nearly as old as Tsuen Tea, but much larger: the video game company Nintendo. It’s known across the globe for the way it revolutionised at-home entertainment with its electronic gaming system back in 1985.

But most people don’t know that the company predates its massive global commercial succe... See more

I mention that Silicon Valley has been stuck within a primary aesthetic of knowing . And that Snap breaks this aesthetic and pushes towards an overarching aesthetic of seeing.

Digital technologies, like wood or concrete, are simply another design material we seek to bend to our will. To manifest and hold these ideas and functions and interaction se... See more

Battle Royale games are probably the perfect example of cybernetic drives towards referential objects. I want the crown at the end. To get there, I must find the golden chests, to shoot people better... before they shoot me.

It’s the cleanest finite loop. One person stands alone, crowned. And then we replay. Each previous loop I participated in, gu... See more

In investing, higher volatility usually equates to higher possible returns. In today’s world of online expression, we settle for lower expected value, market-level outcomes so as to not ruffle any feathers and not take any outsized risk. We’re basically hoping to allow people to know us enough so that they include us in their passive index of human... See more