Jean-Charles' newsletter: n°3

Chaque semaine, je partage quelques articles que j’ai trouvés particulièrement enrichissants. J’espère qu’ils vous aideront autant qu’ils m’ont aidé.

Photo: Danielle Macinnes (Unsplash)

Certains articles sont en français, la plupart sont en anglais (je copie certaines citations en anglais). Ils ne sont pas tous récents et vont au rythme de mes lectures.

Bonne lecture !

🏯 Construire une entreprise

Le concept de “Haters” et “Fanboys” est fascinant car il peut vraiment nous faire dépenser toute notre énergie au mauvais endroit. Paul Graham partage une bonne vision du sujet. Il l’applique surtout aux individus connus. Je pense qu’il peut aussi s’appliquer aux entreprises.

• “The mistake here is to think of the hater as someone you have a dispute with. When you have a dispute with someone, it's usually a good idea to try to understand why they're upset and then fix things if you can. Disputes are distracting. But it's a false analogy to think of a hater as someone you have a dispute with. It's an understandable mistake, if you've never encountered haters before.”

Dans l’article Reality has a surprising amount of details, John Salvatier montre que notre manière de voir les choses et de résoudre les problèmes est conditionnée par les détails que nous remarquons, ou non. Voici quelques citations de l’article en question :

• There is a surprising number of meaningful details in everything we do and they are what makes the difference.
• When you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe (details are hard) and mistake it for a personal failing.
• The physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.
• The more difficult your mission, the more details there will be that are critical to understand for success.
• Such details aren’t automatically visible, even when you’re directly running up against them. Things can just seem messy and noisy instead.
• It’s hard to put your attention on them because you don’t even know what you’re looking for. But after you see them they quickly become so integrated into your intuitive models of the world that they become essentially transparent.
• The direction for improvement is clear: seek detail you would not normally notice about the world.

Radical Candor : si vous n’avez pas lu ce livre de Kim Scott, commandez-le tout de suite. Nous l’offrons à notre équipe ! Mathilde Collin partage quelques-uns de ses tips sur le sujet dans cet article.

📱Monde des technologies

Excellente analyse de Ben Thompson (The Stratechery) sur l’acquisition de Plaid par Visa ($5bn) et sur la valeur des réseaux, et qui plaide pour plus de transparence envers les utilisateurs.

Amazon sous toutes les coutures : ces deux articles de fin 2019 (Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan & Is Amazon Unstoppable?) sont d’excellentes lectures pour comprendre la culture et les ambitions d’Amazon (ainsi que les excellents leadership principles) :

Culture :

• In 2002, Amazon distilled Bezos’s sensibility into a set of Leadership Principles, a collection of maxims including “Invent and Simplify,” “Bias for Action,” and “Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.”
• Bezos loves the word relentless—it appears again and again in his closely read annual letters to shareholders
• Urge employees to “never say ‘that’s not my job,’ ” to “examine their strongest convictions with humility,” to “not compromise for the sake of social cohesion,” and to commit to excellence even if “people may think these standards are unreasonably high.”
• “People who are right a lot change their mind,” he once said.
• “We never claim that our approach is the right one,” Bezos wrote, in a 2016 letter to shareholders. “Just that it’s ours.”

Recrutement :

• The firm would send unsolicited letters to dean’s-list students at top universities, telling them: “We approach our recruiting in unapologetically elitist fashion.”
• Interviews would take the form of a Socratic test. Bezos would probe logical acuity with questions like Why are manhole covers round? According to Lovejoy, “One of his mottos was that every time we hired someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool was always improving.

Equipe :

• He created a new position, technical adviser, to instill his views in top managers; the technical advisers would shadow the master for at least a year, and emerge as what executives jokingly refer to as “Jeff-bots.”
• It distributes economists across a range of teams, where they can, among other things, run controlled experiments that permit scientific, and therefore effective, manipulation of consumer behavior.

Business :

• When Amazon first created Prime, in 2005, Bezos insisted that the price be set high enough that the program felt like a genuine commitment.

Réalité augmentée (The Information) : la start-up californienne Mojo-Vision a dévoilé au CES une lentille connectée qui en plus de corriger la vue, offre à l’utilisateur une interface pour consulter ses notifications, avoir la météo ou encore accéder à son calendrier. Le produit est encore au stade de prototype mais surprend par sa simplicité d’utilisation. Apple et Facebook travaillent eux aussi sur des projets similaires qui utilisent la réalité augmentée, et qui pourraient remplacer les smartphones d’ici quelques années.

Sam Levin a partagé ses prédictions pour la prochaine décennie (The Information). Quelques-unes particulièrement intéressantes :

• The breakup of the internet will accelerate: The internet is already clearly fracturing into different spheres—the American, Chinese and to a lesser extent European internets are all different and play by different rules. This fracturing will intensify. And because of the general trend toward smaller-scale community and personal identity, there isn’t going to be much social pressure from people to hold the internet together.
• Digital citizenship: China and the U.S. will offer some form of digital citizenship to noncitizens that extends certain rights and inclusions within the legal frameworks of the respective countries. As part of this, China will in some form require foreign companies exporting from China to pay suppliers for goods using digital RMB—thereby driving the expansion of that currency.
• Personal computers: Apple and Microsoft will continue to dominate globally. I personally will use a MacBook daily as I do today and it will continue to be my primary interface, though the vast majority of connected people globally will be phone only.
• VR: Oculus will be the dominant platform. Unit sales will look similar to current console sales (about 30 million units a year) and Facebook will have over 50% market share.
• Middle management jobs will disappear: Automation and technology will make it easier for fewer managers to successfully manage far more people. This will remove the bulk of middle management jobs by 2030 and destroy historical job ladders in most knowledge work industries.

👩‍⚕️ Santé

Internet et le secret médical : (Techcrunch)

• Tous les jours, des millions d’images médicales qui contiennent des informations relevant du secret médical sont publiées sur internet.
• 35 millions d’examens médicaux et 1,2 milliards de radios sont disponibles sur internet, ce qui constitue une atteinte considérable au secret médical.
• De nombreux cabinets médicaux ignorent les règles de sécurité de base et relient leur système PACS directement à internet, sans même le protéger par un mot de passe.

💪 Développement personnel

Je suis un énorme fan de Tim Urban et de Wait But Why. Dans cet article, il décrit l’importance la culture :

• Culture is the collection of unwritten rules, norms, and values around “how we do things here.” Every human environment—from the two-person couples to the 20-person classrooms to the 20,000-person companies—is embedded with its own culture.
• Cultures use incentive systems too.
• People in an Idea Lab are high-rung thinkers, so they know that knowledge is hard. They know the world is a foggy, incredibly complex place, and they’re well aware that no single human knows that much about it.
• The aggression never falls on the thinker—arguments are often heated, but they don’t get personal.
• Where Idea Labs are cultures of critical thinking and debate, Echo Chambers are cultures of agreement and confirmation.

💚 Les publications d’Alan

Un nouvel article est disponible sur notre blog et aborde le sujet du bien-être au travail. Longtemps considéré comme tabou, ce sujet est maintenant central pour les entreprises qui veulent que leurs employés soient épanouis et productifs. Alexander nous donne dans cet article les clés pour créer un environnement de travail plus sain: la sécurité, la clarté et la présence d’un but.

Merci à tous et une excellente semaine.