Welcome to some of the notes I took during this most dignified and impressive month of the year.
Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red Blue and Yellow, 1930
How are you going to coach your team?
You can talk about culture or you can answer this question: How are you going to determine what your players are going to feel when they walk into the building every day?
Steve Kerr’s core values for his team are
Joy,
Mindfulness,
Compassion, and
Competitiveness.
Steve has won 9 NBA Championships: five as a player and four as a head coach.
Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.
Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company.
The author uses other examples. Beyond the linguistic observations, the article addresses the underlying issues as well.
The present is overwhelmed with complex global challenges–polycrises that threaten to persist into the future. In this context, the need for a framework that necessitates policymakers consider long-term impacts when making decisions has never been more critical. The United Nations’ report, Our Common Agenda, proposes a landmark solution: a Pact for the Future and a Declaration on Future Generations.
The Declaration is a set of commitments that member states are signing up to – expected to be finalised soon.
Clinical work and life experience have revealed the ways in which, to a surprising degree, cognition is also something that goes on within our relationships with other people. It seems counterintuitive in the age of neuroscience, but I increasingly think that how cognitively impaired you are is a function of the social context in which you find yourself.
(…)
Consider those times when the presence of others has reminded you of an appointment, a name, or simply encouraged you to focus your attention differently. Our relationships provide a context in which to think, and a reason to think. We deliberate with one another to arrive at important decisions, talk through ideas to test them out.
(…)
So while my brain is important, cognition exists beyond my head. I make important decisions by consulting with those close to me. I use reminders and rely on family and colleagues to deliberate about plans. This sort of social process is not only supportive of my cognition – it is my cognition. By extension, the extent to which a person is cognitively impaired is a function of the social supports they have around them.
So far this quarter, 44% of S&P 500 companies that have had earnings calls have mentioned “AI” or “artificial intelligence,” while 56% have not. That ratio has been steadily shifting in recent years as companies try to use the technology to save money and boost profits, but the majority of these companies have still yet to embrace AI.
Because as Peter Block says: “Connection before content.”
But it’s hard.
It's not that we were unaware of Robert Putnam's work or the impact of Bowling Alone or growing social isolation. It's just that a profound love of your living room can push decades of research on social capital to the wayside.
You can tell us that it's just us, but we don't think it is. We don't think it's just us and our friends. We don't think it's just the introverts, or just the COVID-sensitive folks, or just the tech people.
We suspect there's rather a lot of us in this spot. And while we don't need you to join every club. And we don't need you to abandon your living room altogether.
If you've been prioritizing a bunch of other things over social connection, now is a great time to interrogate those choices. At home, sure. But also in that other place most of us spend a full third of our waking hours. Because whether you're feeling it or not, we're pretty sure the people you work with are.
