Last year, 16 percent of Americans said they had personally invested in or traded cryptocurrency. Only three percent of all of the vehicles sold in 2021 were all electric (EVs).
But if you watched the Super Bowl, the commercials for crypto trading platforms and EVs dominated the ad space—often with the support of celebrities. (Unless I missed it, there was not a single commercial for a gas-powered vehicle the entire game.) The money is flowing toward big bets on the future.
Read MoreShared cultural language can be a boon to movements for change—and a barrier to seeing that change happen.
Bumperstickers and banners establish shared credentials, show us who we can trust, tell us who’s on the inside of the movement. But they’re also off-putting to those who don’t share that language, and can antagonize those whom we need to make the change happen.
Read MoreDealBook reports this morning that Walmart and other major employers are starting a heavy push toward requiring vaccines for their employees—just not the ones on the front lines, who are most likely to be unvaccinated. The article cites fears over the tight labor market and negotiations with unions as potential suspects for the half measures, but I suspect a more nefarious motive hides just underneath the surface: the fear of “politicizing” the workplace.
Read MoreImportant concepts covered here include identity foreclosure, cognitive entrenchment, escalation of commitment, and why we all should have bailed on “Game of Thrones” earlier.
Read MoreWhether or not you agreed with the FDA and CDC’s decision to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine distribution this week (and there was a lot of debate), how the pause was communicated left a lot to be desired—and Facebook, once again, filled the conspiracy theory void
Important read from journalist Charlie Warzel about how irreparably broken Twitter’s Trending Topics are
Is this the dawn of the B2B sharing economy?
I’ve mostly stayed off of social media for the past few months — not because I’m taking any kind of intentional detox, but because I’ve had a hard time figuring out the right role of social for myself, a recovering evangelist about social media’s power who is now increasingly ambivalent about its effects on society.
Chrissy Teigen put it succinctly when she recently quit Twitter: “This no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively.” One could apply that logic to the entire social industrial complex, which has an oversized effect on our interpretation of reality.
There’s a classic thought experiment in change management called a burning platform.
From a 1993 book by Daryl R. Conner called “Managing at the Speed of Change”, it describes a situation in which maintaining the status quo is so costly, so detrimental to the business, that the level of resolve to change becomes a no-brainer. The metaphor Conner uses is is a literal platform on fire: you have to jump, because the status quo means certain death.
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