Strategy

The BASB Customer Persona

I recently compiled all my notes, findings, and ideas about the “ideal customer” for Building a Second Brain, and put them into a single document. I’m working with my editor to narrow down and refine this customer profile from here, so I can have a crystal clear person in mind as I write the sample…

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Behind the Scenes of a Profitable Online Course

I advise everyone I know to create an online course. Everyone has something to say. Everyone has valuable knowledge that others could benefit from. I believe that in 10 years online courses will be like websites today – everyone who works online will have at least one. And without one, you will be all but…

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MESA Part 5: The Future of Work That MESA Envisions

MESA Co. considers their method not just a problem-solving tool, but an entirely new way of working. As their ambitions have grown, they’ve begun looking toward a future in which this way of conducting work is nothing more than common sense.

In this article, I’ll outline a vision for what the future of work might look like if MESA has its way.

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MESA Part 4: The Origins of MESA

The MESA Method is full of firmly held beliefs and sharp distinctions. To understand why they’re so important, you have to understand where they came from. I recently sat down with Bárbara Soalheiro, the founder and CEO of MESA Co., and Lígia Giatti, her number 2, to try and understand the origins of this new way of working.

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MESA Part 3: The Art of Unlocking People’s Creative Potential

In Part 2, I laid out what I believe are the 10 principles that MESA Co. uses to fine-tune the working environment.

But what are they fine-tuning the environment for? Unlocking people’s creative potential.

The open secret of MESA (and other Accelerated Work Experiences) is that, beyond the rules and guidelines and structures, their true purpose is to unlock people’s potential to achieve more than they imagined was possible.

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MESA Part 2: The 10 Principles of Work Sprints

Enter your email here if you’re interested in hearing more about MESA in the future. In Part 1, I described the basics of the team-based work sprint methodology known as MESA. In this article, I’ll take a closer look at the underlying principles that tie together MESA and other kinds of Accelerated Work Experiences (AWEs)….

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Emergent Strategy: Organizing for Social Justice

When I moved from San Francisco to Oakland in 2014, I was just trying to pay cheaper rent. I never expected to be influenced by the movements that flow through Oakland’s veins: the movements for social justice, for environmental justice, and for black liberation. I’ve since had the privilege of working with some of the…

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The Future of Ebooks

I’ve published a few ebooks over the past year, and have plans for a couple more before the end of the year. In contrast to fears about the “end of reading,” my self-publishing experiences have led me to believe that we’re in the midst of a transformational revolution in reading. But it remains to be…

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Why I’m Leaving Medium

I’ve been writing on Medium for three and a half years. In that time, I’ve written somewhere north of 100,000 words, in more than 50 long-form essays, read by many tens of thousands of people. I’m a “Top Writer” in two of the most popular categories on the site — Productivity and Reading — and have more than 8,000…

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Wardley Mapping Workshop

On March 7th, 2018, our Head of Ops Benjamin Mosior facilitated a virtual workshop on Wardley Mapping, a value-chain mapping technique that has taken the strategy world by storm in recent years. First developed by Simon Wardley to navigate the emerging cloud computing industry, it’s now exploded into dozens of different industries and applications. Here…

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The Annual Review is a Rearchitecture

I previously described how the weekly review is an operating system, funneling each bit of information you captured during the week to its proper place. I also described the monthly review as a systems check, periodically making sure your systems are in good working order. Now we’re ready to dive into the annual review, which…

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The Monthly Review is a Systems Check

In The Weekly Review is an Operating System, I detailed the process I go through each week to capture any new open loops, clear my workspaces, and nail down the events and commitments for the week. In this article, I’d like to do the same for my Monthly Review (MR). Because the MR touches on…

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