sari

Writer Steven Johnson does this in a single document he calls a “spark file”—every time he has an idea, he adds it to the file, and then he revisits the list every couple of months.

Mainframes are still a big business and so is IBM; PCs are still a big business and so is Microsoft. But they don’t set the agenda anymore - no-one is afraid of them.

What criteria would you use to hire someone to do this job if you were in my seat?

Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust. Every presidential statement, every CIA assessment, every investigative report by a great newspaper, suddenly acquired an arbitrary aspect, and seemed grounded in moral predilection rather than intellectual rigor. When proof for and... See more

For example, I have 85k Twitter followers, but a standard tweet might only get 10k-20k impressions. I don’t have control over whether my followers see my posts. Twitter does. The tradeoff is that it gives me millions of impressions for my most viral posts. I get more new user acquisition by giving away control of re-engagement.