A Better Course

Nivea advert
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

One of my most hated adverts of the moment is this one, for Nivea moisturiser. It is unreadably bland - what is actually going on? How does it relate to the tagline, “Look ready to face the day”?
There are some conclusions that we can draw about what’s going on here. [...]

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The Screens Issue - If You Liked This, Sure to Love That - Winning the Netflix Prize - NYTimes.com
Customers pay a flat monthly rate, generally $16.99 (although cheaper plans are available), to check out as many movies as they want. The problem with this business model is that new members often have a couple of [...]

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potlatch: Westfield attacks Tower Bridge
Why have they replaced Tower Bridge with some leather boots, belts and bling chains? No, honestly, why? Perhaps even their advertising drones were struggling to capture the full gaudy scale of Westfield, recognising that there is no neat or simple way of conveying quite what the place is all about.
(tags: westfield [...]

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Mmm, Chocolate Pie… Chart | FlowingData
"Mary and Matt kick it up a notch with some design and 5.5 ounces of chocolate. It's a chocolate pie chart of 70% milk chocolate, 20% dark, and 10% white." Christmas is coming, all!
(tags: chart stats statistics visualization chocolate flowingdata )

Big Contrarian → You’ve [...]

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Bob Sutton: A Compilation of Euphemisms for Layoffs
although the language is obfuscated, he is implying that the people he is letting go are the weaker ones, even though many of Tesla's problems clearly stem from errors made by senior management (including Musk) and from the the economic environment.
(tags: bobsutton leadership layoffs management [...]

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From Big Contrarian (specifically this post):
I know few people curtailing their spending habits. Quite the opposite. [...] Anecdotes are of course useless, but the disconnect strikes me as something to think about.

The anecdotes here are, I think, interesting data points - are people spending less and consciously not talking about that? How long is the [...]

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McCain Camp Retools, Targets Obama | Newsweek Politics: Campaign 2008 | Newsweek.com
Early that summer, the campaign made the unorthodox decision to announce its vice presidential pick via text messages sent directly to supporters. It wasn't just a trick to do something flashy with technology and attract media attention. The point was to collect voters' cell-phone [...]

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Zoilus: Fan Dance:<br>Fandoms & the 2008 Election
Fandom feels like a highly inappropriate way to relate to political life: In my book I discuss the troubling tone of a lot of cultural-taste conversation, the way that it's used to sharpen social distinctions, but at least there the stakes are relatively low (at least in the short [...]

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Lessons Learned: Lean startups vs lean companies
Any activity that actively promotes us getting through each iteration (including the learning phase) faster, is value-creating. Everything else (including a lot of traditional "agile" or "lean" tactics) is waste.
(tags: startup innovation lessonslearned data insight customer leadership )

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