Weekly Pulse by William Meller

The Weekly Pulse is my content curation and my highlights from readings, books, podcasts, insights, and everything I discovered during the week.

So, let’s go with some discoveries from the week!

#1 – When Machine Learning Goes Off the Rails
#2 – The Rules of Co-opetition
#3 – The New New Product Development Game
#4 – I’m not languishing, I’m dormant
#5 – What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others

When Machine Learning Goes Off the Rails

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Boris Babic, I. Glenn Cohen, Theodoros Evgeniou and Sara Gerke

Summary: Machine learning can go wrong in a number of ways. A key question executive must answer is whether it’s better to allow smart offerings to continuously evolve or to “lock” their algorithms and periodically update them. In addition, every offering will need to be appropriately tested before and after rollout and regularly monitored to make sure it’s performing as intended.

3 Highlights:

“… Businesses will need to establish their own guidelines, including ethical ones, to manage these new risks—as some companies, like Google and Microsoft, have already done…“

“… As machine-learning-based products and services and the environments they operate in evolve, companies may find that their technologies don’t perform as initially intended…”

“… Just as cognitive testing of employees won’t reveal how they’ll do when added to a preexisting team in a business, laboratory testing cannot predict the performance of machine-learning systems in the real world.…”

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The Rules of Co-opetition

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Adam Brandenburger and Barry Nalebuﬀ

Summary: In this article two professors who helped introduce the approach offer a framework for deciding whether to team up with a rival, drawing on examples from Apple and Samsung, DHL and UPS, Ford and GM, and Google and Yahoo. Their advice: Start by analyzing what each party will do if it chooses not to cooperate and how that will affect industry dynamics

3 Highlights:

“… getting the right mindset requires choosing the right people…“

“… Cooperation with rivals also has an important emotional aspect. Some people are comfortable with the idea that there can be multiple winners, and some are not. As a result, co-opetition may end up being a strategy of last resort even in cases where it should be the first resort…”

“… There are many reasons for competitors to cooperate. At the simplest level, it can be a way to save costs and avoid duplication of effort…”

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The New New Product Development Game

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka

Summary: Sometimes it is great to come back to the classics to remember the basis of what we are discussing today. And this one by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka from 1986, is referenced a lot by the Scrum community as a primary inspiration.

3 Highlights:

“… A project team consisting of members with varying functional specializations, thought processes, and behavior patterns carries out new product development…“

“… The project teams appear to be absorbed in a never-ending quest for “the limit…”

“… We observed an equally strong drive on the part of the project members to transfer their learning to others outside the group…”

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I’m not languishing, I’m dormant

Source: Austin Kleon Blog
Author: Austin Kleon

Summary: Recently we were talking about the mood of last year: languishing. But Austin Kleon has another point here about that feeling, considering that he disliked the term “languishing” the minute he heard it.

3 Highlights:

“… To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven…“

“… I’m not languishing because I’m not trying to flourish…”

“… I may even look dead, but like Corita Kent once described one of her own dormant periods, “new things are happening very quietly inside of me…”

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What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others

Source: Harvard Business Review
Author: Robert C. Pozen and Kevin Downey

Summary: Would you rate yourself as highly productive? We’ve learned a lot about personal productivity and what makes some people more productive than others. But how we can compare the productivity of senior and juniors professional? Or even compare men with women?

3 Highlights:

“… working longer hours does not necessarily mean higher personal productivity…“

“… we found that professionals with the highest productivity scores tended to do well on the same clusters of habits…”

“… we found the higher productivity scores for Europe, Asia, and Australia were driven by strong habits in areas such as daily schedules, not constantly checking messages, focusing early on the final product, and thinking carefully before reading or writing.…”

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Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Special Edition, 20232023-12-29
Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Week 51, 20232023-12-22
Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Week 50, 20232023-12-15
Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Week 49, 20232023-12-08
Weekly Pulse by William Meller | Week 48, 20232023-12-01

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