In one of our LEAD classes this past week we discussed global-local tension within Vodafone and had a strong disagreement about what was most “efficient” for a company: allowing certain business lines to run themselves with a decentralized model via a local-first leadership style, or centralizing nearly all operations with a global-first leadership style. I think we weren’t really disagreeing at all, and in fact I think we could agree it depends on the situation. And for that, I have a framework.

I realized I never wrote down why June and I created Vsho in the first place, and why we felt passionate that a community-led platform for video product reviews should exist.

During Vsho’s fundraising phase, it was a peak for crypto and crypto investment, and as a result a lot of feedback we received was around pivoting into web3. We were very reticent to pivot to web3, since it wasn’t necessary for the problem we were trying to solve and we had many engineering qualms with crypto in particular. I read a recent blog post that does a great job of detailing the technical issues in particular, but I wanted to expand on why we weren’t so bullish on web3 during our fundraising. We weren’t convinced that it provided a competitive advantage to solving our user needs, and we had a deep skepticism of current crypto markets.

My LEAD class was discussing information silos the other day, and it struck me that most information silos we talk about are the results of implicit decision making. For example, perhaps a person wants to share information, but they are waiting for a better time to deliver it. Or a person wants information from someone, but doesn’t want to step on another person’s toes, so they delay asking for that information. These are examples of gut feelings impact information silos, instead of an explicit decision.

However, I have been in situations where teams deliberated debated information sharing, the argument arising because of fundamentally different management philosophies.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been genuinely excited by a software update of Apple’s, since progress tends to be incremental lately. I was genuinely excited when iOS 13 introduced swipe-to-type, and when iOS 11 allowed automatic wifi sharing (although it seems to not work terribly well, still), and when WatchOS 5 introduced automatic workout detection. These moments were delightful as they reduce the amount of tapping on my phone that I needed to do to type, share wifi passwords, and start a workout. I’ve been excited about iOS 16 since it makes a few more things even more delightful for the user, and the visual upgrades are stark and fresh.