The Weekly: Edition #16 - October 25, 2019
The truth about open offices (Harvard Business Review)
+ The movement towards more collaborative environments in the WeWork era is an undeniable trend, but two organizational consultants took the trend to task to explore: does it actually produce more collaboration? Our takeaways:
1. Open office floor plans can actually deter face-to-face interactions. The consultants with Humanyze analyzed data collected on two Fortune 500 companies before and after switching to open floor plans and concluded that face-to-face interactions declined by 70% after switching over while electronic communication increased. Sometimes, there's no substitute for being able to close the door to get pressing work done - doors simply get replaced by headphones in open office plans.
2. Floor plan design must accommodate employee workflows. Different work streams require different setups. Some employees require a lot of collaboration and thus need access to a conference setup or collaboration area. Other employees are much more in need of solitude and singular in their work stream. A good mixture of collaboration space, conference space, and solitary work spaces is highly recommended with square footage depending on your company's work streams.
3. Proximity of teams matters. "Research that one of us (Ben) was involved in at the MIT Media Lab shows that the probability that any two people on a corporate campus will interact physically or digitally is directly proportional to the distance between their desks." While this may be obvious, at scale, proximity directly increases probability of interaction and collaboration.
The overall takeaway is that each organization's work flows look different and require varying degrees of interaction. The key is designing your physical spaces to fit those work streams perfectly rather than forcing employee interaction to look or operate a certain way.
Why did the Boeing 737 Max crash? (David Perrell)
+ David Perrell details the cultural and organizational problems resulting from a previous merger that ultimately led to the 737 Max fiasco. The desire for an expedient profit, while important, cannot be the only priority, especially in industries where human lives are at stake.
Trade spend: the fight for shelf space in consumer retail (Aditi Dash)
+ Aditi Dash put together a helpful breakdown of all the various types of trade spend for consumer brands attempting to gain shelf space in brick and mortar retail and the ideal candidate for each type of trade spend.
Nick Gray's notes on selling his company, Museum Hack (Nick Gray)
+ Nick Gray detailed the process of selling his small business to former partners and employees in a short but worthwhile read.
Spotify saved the music industry. Now what? (Fortune)
+ While some may argue this title, there is little doubt that the music industry and streaming services are 'frenemies': they simply can't live without each other - for now.
EY's latest report on Private Equity and its historic evolution (Ernst & Young)
+ In EY's report on PE fund flows, there are several trends worth noting: "PE firms now manage commitments of nearly US$3.4t, up from less than US$500b in 2000. Including other asset types in the private capital universe – infrastructure, real estate, private debt, natural resources, etc.– brings the total to more than US$6t."
Online influencers tell you what to buy, but retailers wonder who's listening (WSJ $)
+ The influencer marketplace for brand advertising is opaque at best, and brands are beginning to demand more results from their marketing spend in this area.
Help your sales reps grow using data-driven coaching (First Round Review)
+ Sales is an integral part of nearly every organization, and this First Round Review post gets into how to use sales data to coach your reps to success: "(Sales) Ride-alongs are a valuable coaching tool. But if it’s the only one in your arsenal, then things will crack as you start to scale."
The untold story of the 2018 Olympics cyberattack, the most deceptive hack in history (Wired)
+ "If they couldn't recover the servers by the next morning, the entire IT backend of the organizing committee—responsible for everything from meals to hotel reservations to event ticketing—would remain offline as the actual games got underway. And a kind of technological fiasco that had never before struck the Olympics would unfold in one of the world's most wired countries."
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