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Instagraming Life

Wednesday, April 10th, 2019

https://www.flickr.com/photos/almanji/5317233737/

It seems these days that people decorate their homes, choose their friends, food and clothes, determine their career path and employer, and organize their lives all in terms of what looks good on Instagram.

Doesn’t matter if the meal tastes good, as long as it photographs well. The same for everything else.

As long as a story can be spun and curated to impress people who aren’t known, and probably never will be, people will do/buy it.

And if an experience isn’t documented with pictures and posted online it might as well not have happened.

No kidding.

I actually overheard a guy say as much. Apparently his phone’s camera stopped working and he was grousing that the money spent on the trip was wasted.

What a strange world these people live in.

Is it your world?

I’m so glad it’s not mine.

Image credit: Aleks Grynis

If The Shoe Fits: Stop Curating and Start Managing

Friday, August 31st, 2018

 

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

Founders are a breed apart, especially young founders, with little to no business experience, let alone leadership/managerial experience.

I got a call from one I work with occasionally. After getting the information he had called for he took me to task over Monday’s post.

In short, he said that founders don’t have much time to spend on culture, let alone do the people-managing stuff I’m always writing about.

He went on to say that’s why people in young companies tend to be so similar. It’s far easier, not to mention more comfortable, to get stuff done when everyone has a similar mindset.

My response was that his mindset would do much to limit his market, so he would do well to plan on being a nitch player.

It was not appreciated.

Curating a team creates the same problem that curating freshmen roommate assignments created.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

Curation, whether of roommates of team, has no positive effect, which is why colleges are going back to random freshman matching and companies are striving for more diversity. Duke eliminated curated matching.

Freshman year of college, Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs at Duke explained, is about students “engaging with difference and opening their eyes to opportunities, and meeting entirely different people than the ones they grew up with or went to high school with.”

What this 26-year-old founder didn’t say (and may not even realize) is that some things, such as successful managing, are the result of hard-won experience, not “vision.”

There is a reason that more diverse companies have better results.

Just as there is a reason that managers who practice good customer service on their teams attract the best people, have lower turnover, and enjoy better personal career growth / stronger startup success (if founders).

Image credit: HikingArtist

Golden Oldies: Will Curation and Safe Spaces at College Lead to a Fear of Living?

Monday, November 6th, 2017

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over more than a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies are a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Curation has gotten much worse over the last two years since this was written. Facebook curates your news feed based on your profile and online actions, so you see mostly items — whether real or fake — that are in line with your worldview. Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter and most other sites show you “targeted ads” based on the the cornucopia of personal information at their fingertips.

The result is a world that is narrowing and, in doing so, becomes more harrowing.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stella12/14556898073

Earlier this month I shared a conversation with a founder who believes he can lead only one type of person.

It wasn’t that surprising, because the more things are curated the more we hear from and cleave to people like ourselves.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

But isn’t college supposed to help change that by exposing students to people with different beliefs, experiences, attitudes, etc.?

Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.

Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.

Now college students are taking the concept much further with the demand for “safe spaces.”

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. (…)

Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School commented, “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

This need for safety and zero-level tolerance for discord makes me wonder what will happen to the current college generations when they venture into the workplace, let alone the rest of the real world.

Image credit: Deb Nystrom

Ducks in a Row: Personal Brand / Personal Culture

Tuesday, July 18th, 2017

https://www.flickr.com/photos/phploveme/4684039656/Everywhere you turn these days you’re told to use social media to create an easily recognized persona that becomes your “personal brand.”

It’s supposed to be the “real” you, i.e., authentic.

It’s also supposed to be the best you, which usually means inauthentic.

Inauthentic, because people typically share all their upside, but rarely the downside.

They post all the fabulous pictures (even helping them along via photoshop-type editing).

Non-fabulous pics are a rarity, unless they are meant to be funny, e.g., morning bedhead before coffee, and those are screened carefully.

We’re not talking spontaneous, rather faux spontaneous.

In fact, everything is carefully curated to enhance and extend one’s personal brand.

But what about personal culture?

As with company culture, your personal culture is based on your personal values.

Values are much harder to curate, since they underlie all actions.

Fred Destin is the latest VC to apologize for his actions, along with Binary Capital’s Justin Caldbeck, 500 Startups founder Dave McLure, and Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca.

Apparently it didn’t occur to any of them that their actions towards women were unacceptable, which makes you wonder about their values.

There is no wondering about Donald Trump’s values, since he stated publicly that he could do as he pleased, because he is rich.

The take away here is that no matter how carefully you curate your brand your personal culture will eventually trip you up if your curation doesn’t accurately reflect your values.

Image credit: Jinho Jung

Ducks in a Row: Behavioral Addiction Means Profit

Tuesday, March 7th, 2017

https://www.flickr.com/photos/notionscapital/4549543273/

Do you believe that Twitter was founded with effects like Arab Spring in mind? Or that Mark Zukerberg started Facebook for altruistic reasons? Or that Instagram, Snapchat and other similar sites actually have your wellbeing in mind?

If so, you probably also believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

The primary purpose of every one of these sites is simple: to make as much money as possible.

How?

By using personalization to achieve behavioral addiction.

Infinite personalization comprises the artificial intelligence-driven, big-data based tools that allow algorithms to build a personalized Internet echo chamber customized just for you, designed to make you feel great. Infinite personalization feeds you the real, the fake, and everything in between, with the simple goal of holding your attention and getting you to come back for more. It is the process by which companies can measure, match, and predict consumers’ individual preferences with amazing accuracy and then tailor offerings to maximize revenue.

It’s done with full knowledge and, in my opinion, malice afore thought.

It’s why tech titans, starting with Steve Jobs in 2010, limit their kids, as I said a couple of years ago in The Hypocrites of Tech.

They want their kids to grow to positions of leadership and power and know they can’t if their world shrinks to a self-enhancing echo chamber that only regurgitates information that fits their preconceived ideas.

Personalization is active in the real world, too, and has been for several years, with young adults inventing ways to shrink their world by curating their college roommates and demanding “safe places.”  

All I can say it ‘good luck’ when their carefully curated echo chamber has to function in the work-world.

However, it’s a sad and scary commentary that in the frenzy to make more and more money tech is providing a detailed roadmap, along with the supporting technology, for demagogs to become dictators.

For a more detailed look at behavioral addiction check out Adam Alter’s Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Image credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Will Curation and Safe Spaces at College Lead to a Fear of Living?

Monday, April 13th, 2015

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stella12/14556898073

Earlier this month I shared a conversation with a founder who believes he can lead only one type of person.

It wasn’t that surprising, because the more things are curated the more we hear from and cleave to people like ourselves.

There’s no question that curation reinforces opinions, while eliminating conflicting ones, narrows people beyond from where they started and acts like fertilizer to unconscious bias and outright bigotry.

But isn’t college supposed to help change that by exposing students to people with different beliefs, experiences, attitudes, etc.?

Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.

Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.

Now college students are taking the concept much further with the demand for “safe spaces.”

Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material. (…)

Eric Posner, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School commented, “Perhaps overprogrammed children engineered to the specifications of college admissions offices no longer experience the risks and challenges that breed maturity,” But “if college students are children, then they should be protected like children.”

This need for safety and zero-level tolerance for discord makes me wonder what will happen to the current college generations when they venture into the workplace, let alone the rest of the real world.

Image credit: Deb Nystrom

Curation Can Lead to Bigotry

Monday, September 9th, 2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/safari_vacation/7496669132/Companies that allow silos risk seeing divisions and departments that fight each other instead of focusing how each can best contribute to the company’s success—think Microsoft.

Globally, politics has become dominated by ideological silos and the wealthy believers who funnel rivers of money to their pet ideologues—think US Congress.

Several years ago a couple of startups gave the college-bound a way to curate their roommates, so they could be sure not to be exposed to ideas, attitudes or upbringing not in sync with their current thinking.

Mangers have been doing this for decades by thoughtlessly hiring people like themselves, so they can stay within their personal comfort zones.

Every article I read tells me to “sign in and see what your friends are reading” or buying/thinking/doing/voting.

Dozens of new apps offer to filter your information/experience/travel plans/etc. based on what “people like you” think/did/own/bought.

The result of all this curation by like-minded people is a constant narrowing of experiences, therefore attitudes and thoughts.

That narrowing leads to an inability to understand those not like us, which, in turn, kills compassion, i.e., the ability to walk in the other person’s shoes.

The end result is a rise in all forms of bigotry, not just people, but food, places, cultures, religions, politics—the list is endless.

I’m not saying there isn’t value in curation, especially considering the tsunami of information that engulfs everything in its path.

Just be sure a large chunk of the recommendations come from people NOT like you.

Flickr image credit: SalFalko

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