Philip Soriano
@philip
Philip Soriano
It turns out my really big problem was thinking I might one day get rid of all my problems, when the truth is that there's no escaping the mucky, malodorous compost-heap of this reality. Which is OK, actually. Compost is the stuff that helps things grow.
Oliver Burkeman • What if you never sort your life out?
Like girls, boys openly express their desire for genuine connections with others, including with boys. They reveal the human capacity for mutual understanding, care, and empathy and demonstrate remarkably astute abilities to read the human world. Yet as they reach middle to late adolescence and as expectations of manhood intensify, they begin to... See more
Between quality childcare and longer parental leaves, the bigger contributor to a healthy and productive son is a longer parental leave.
John Gray PhD • The Boy Crisis
They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value
RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier. In 1995 Forbes magazine predicted the company’s business model would make it “the first casualty of the internet.” In fact, since becoming its CEO, Engstrom has transformed RELX (its name since 2015) into a technology-driven... See more
RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier. In 1995 Forbes magazine predicted the company’s business model would make it “the first casualty of the internet.” In fact, since becoming its CEO, Engstrom has transformed RELX (its name since 2015) into a technology-driven... See more
They Obsess Over the Metrics That Customers Value
RELX is a 200-year-old London-based company formerly known as Reed Elsevier.
CEO—Engstrom, who was a McKinsey consultant and an executive at two publishing houses before assuming leadership of RELX, did that by coaching every RELX employee to obsess over “customer value”—the benefit the customer realizes from using a product. He has been repeating the same questions for 20 years: How does the customer measure value? How do we know? How do we measure that? How does using this product improve the customer’s economics? How do we know how much better off the customer is with our product—and how do we know that it is better on that metric than the alternatives are?
All too often when companies talk about customer metrics, they look at numbers such as customer acquisition cost, customer retention, lifetime value, and average transaction size—metrics that reflect how a customer benefits the company. In contrast, the how-obsessed CEOs we’ve studied focus on metrics that reflect how the company benefits the customer.
Focusing deeply on how the company creates and delivers value for its customers was a cornerstone of the practices of the leaders we studied. According to our interviews, people in the organization don’t experience this specific kind of detail orientation as micromanaging. Rather, it creates mission clarity. When leaders show how much they personally care about what matters most to customers, attending to details becomes a shared norm for every employee—which expands the decision rights of those close to the front lines.
being an involved dad creates a “dad brain” that replaces his single-man desires. He’ll experience a decrease in the testosterone previously used in the hunt for sex and recovery after rejection, and an increase in oxytocin emanating from the joys of loving and being loved by an infant who needs him.
John Gray PhD • The Boy Crisis
Writer and artist Austin Kleon uses two desks: an “analog” desk for generating ideas by hand, and a “digital” desk for refining work on a computer
I believe there are two plausible scenarios for the future of knowledge work. There’s one in which as machines become more human-like in their capabilities, we paradoxically become more machine-like in our pursuit of productivity, focused on efficiency and keeping busy above all else. But there’s another where we lean into ways of working that are... See more
Sari Azout • The End of Productivity
A dad needs to be able to contribute a countervailing consideration to mom’s fear: the value of learning to explore with dad as a GPS as needed, so they don’t get too lost.
John Gray PhD • The Boy Crisis
Inside the Minds of the Ultrawealthy (Published 2017)
nytimes.com