How to have important blog posts read to you aloud on your phone

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Information overload is a defining challenge of our time. It’s tempting to just shut down, ignore all the incredible things on the internet, or rely on serendipity and social feeds to bring you what you need. You don’t have to do that, though.

There are strategies and tools that you can use to tap thoughtfully into the abundance of knowledge being published online without being overwhelmed. One tactic I have added to my practice lately has been the following method of having every new post on a few important blogs read to me aloud. This is something I’ve mentioned to several people, casually, and they’ve told me I should write a blog post about how to do it.

I do this for the blog of the company I work for (Sprinklr). And for other companies and organizations I find so inspiring I want to try to read everything they post too. I just subscribed to Stefaan Verhulst’s excellent new Living Library this way. There are a variety of sources I want to keep good track of.

The newest way I’ve been doing it is by using the mobile app Pocket and its wonderful text-to-speech continuous play audio feature. Bookmark an article to Pocket and it will read the article aloud while you clean your kitchen or walk your dog. The voice is a touch robotic but I’ve gotten used to it.

I put things into Pocket in many different ways, but using the tool If This, Then That, you can put any new blog post into Pocket from a specific source.

Here’s the process in a one minute video, written out below.

1. Create an account on IFTTT.
2. Create an account on Pocket.
3. Create a new “applet” and select “RSS” (really simple syndication, the primary form of automated feed that blogs publish their articles to)
4. Grab the feed for the blog or website you want to subscribe to. You may need to view the source in your browser and look for the feed in the code. This is not hard to do. It’s ok, you can do it.
5. Plug that feed URL into IFTT
6. Then, select Pocket as the next service to activate. When there’s a new article in the RSS feed for the blog, then send that link to Pocket.
7. You’ll be prompted to connect your Pocket account and your IFTTT account. Once that’s done, you can create your RSS-to-Pocket applet and then it will be run automatically every day.

Now you can load up Pocket on your phone (see screenshot below), click on the headphones icon, and it will read aloud all the articles you’ve bookmarked and all the blog posts that have come in through IFTTT.

It’s a pretty great way to regularly keep up with a blog or organization that’s important to you.

It’s easier than ever to picture corporate social responsibility verified by blockchain

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Walmart announced today that it will require suppliers of leafy greens to upload data to a private blockchain provided by IBM next year. The goal is to make it much faster to verify origins of greens responsible for food borne illness. That will be good for people who buy spinach at Walmart and for Walmart’s reduced costs in responding to crisis.

There’s sure to be an innovation dividend, too. It’s not hard to imagine this expanding across the biggest supply chain in the world, and then to jump into more firms even beyond the other places it’s currently being tested.

Bloomberg: “IBM is working on food traceability with 10 other companies, including Dole Food Co., Unilever NV and Driscoll’s Inc., a berry supplier. The computer giant holds a leading 32 percent share of the $700 million-plus market for blockchain products and services, WinterGreen Research Inc. said in January, and has 1,500 working in the field.”

Let’s see CSR on the blockchain

This sounds like a great start but I sure would like to see the immutable ledger paradigm put into networks like these supply chains and used to track:

  • Climate impact
  • Worker respect

Just that! Verified by 3rd parties, I’m sure, but with that verification certified by said blockchain.

Help slow down climate apocalypse and use blockchain to prove that your whole team is doing it. I’ll buy more if you do, and I know I’m not alone.

E-books from the public library make it easier to expand your horizons

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I just finished Atul Gawande’s book Better, on the science of performance improvement, especially in medicine, and it was worth the time it took to read. I might have paid for it; the last book (A Very Brief Introduction to the Future) and the next book (Quantum Revelation: A Radical Synthesis of Science and Spirituality) on my reading list were things I paid for in print.

I’ve previewed and reserved On Grand Strategy though and that’s one I wouldn’t have paid for – it’s too far outside my core interests. I learned something really big from it: the importance of thinking in terms of strategic sequences. That’s something that’s easier said than done but hugely important and much easier to do when you think about it consciously.

Because we all paid taxes to fund the public library, and because ebooks are so easy to quickly check out from home, the diversity of ideas that I’m being exposed to is substantially increased relative to the books I’d be willing and able to buy in hard copy. If that’s true even for me, I can only imagine how true it might be for other people less apt to invest in exposure to diverse perspectives.

I’m thinking about this just after leaving a community swimming pool, where for a few dollars people of all kinds of backgrounds have come to be in the water. It’s far more diverse that my workplace, than the natural foods grocery store I shop at, or the last restaurant I ate at.

Collective creation of free and low-cost resources is a powerful way to expand and enrich people’s experiences and perspectives. If we as a society choose corporate alternatives to these collective institutions, optimized for profit and efficiency instead of for public accessibility, it will be a great loss. Let’s make sure to support and appreciate those public institutions.

Doing business in a complex world means looking past straight lines

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Is your software investment/community/engagement strategy going to drive revenue?  That’s a very important question, so let’s treat it that way.

Here’s a conversation going on between some of the most influential thinkers in the world today about how business is changing.

Consider this question with two things in mind: buying committees and non-linear “customer journeys,” where prospective customers don’t just avoid straight lines, they don’t event spend most of their time thinking about a company with that company.  They spend most of their time talking about or reading about that company with other people entirely.

Gartner says that only 20-30% of IT investments have a *direct* business impact. The other 70-80% have an *indirect* impact – and that’s often where the *biggest* impact is made.

Superior strategy, since at least the days of the Roman empire, takes into account strategic sequences of events, not simply single cause-and-effect moves on the chessboard.

(Below, a great Gartner graphic via Bob Apollo via Gartner’s Hank Barnes.)

 

 

Nexus causality is a concept that says almost everything is caused not by one single thing, but by a whole nexus of contributing factors, many of which may be necessary but not sufficient.  This is hard for the human mind to comprehend, so we tend to look for a single factor to attribute all causality to.  The factor we feel like we might have the most control over – often feels like the convenient one to point to.

Asking whether something will have a direct and immediate business impact is not the right question.  Asking whether something is a strong leading indicator of success, whether there’s high or increasingly high correlation between a thing and success, those are better questions.  Asking whether a thing can provide substantial competitive differentiation, and then basic competence can take care of the last mile, that’s an interesting question.

Another Way to Frame the Culture Change of Digital Transformation: Machine, Platform, Crowd

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Transformation is a phenomenon, and digital transformation is a big thing these days – but it’s hard to put your finger on just how to explain it.  It’s not just a matter of digitizing business processes – in best cases it’s about building a digital-first business model.  What does that mean? And what do people mean when they say it’s not just about technology – it’s also about cultural change? That’s often the biggest obstacle, in fact, to successful digital transformation: leadership stuck in old cultural ways.

Here’s what I think could be a good way to explain the change going on in the economy and world.

“In the dynamic between mind and machine, product and platform, core and crowd – the latter of each has grown so much stronger that the relationship between each of these pairs must be re-examined…The business world is always changing but in transitions as profound as this one, things are even more unsettled than usual.”

That’s from the book Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future, by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson.  It’s a good book.

I think this also offers a good model for self-examination.  How much are you relying on your own mind – and how much are you leveraging the power of the machines you have access to?  I know I think of a lot of ideas, but observing the output of technologies offers a whole new level of insight into what I’m working on.   I get pretty excited about the product of my labor, but the true power is increasingly from the networks, the platforms, and if I’m not keeping my eye there, on the opportunities and the consequences, then I may be missing the lion’s share of what’s available.  For example, I work a lot with Twitter data on a product, but I’ve got to mind the value emerging out on the network of Twitter users and conversations.  The products I use help me gather that value.  And of course the core of any company these days is remiss if it doesn’t pay attention to, and tap into, the crowd it aims to do business in.

I’m going to try using this historic shift toward the power of machine, platform, and crowd as a way to talk about digital transformation.

500 Ways to Be Inspired by Wikis

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When I visualize a positive future for the world, it’s networked, interconnected, creative, and emergent.  It’s collaborative and aware of its history.  It looks like a wiki.

Like podcasting has, wikis (beyond Wikipedia) may still prove to be a technology that saw a burst of nerdly excitement, then a long period of obscurity, and then a break into the mainstream.  I’m hoping so.

The first wiki was created by Ward Cunningham in Portland, Oregon in 1995.  It’s still up online!  Cunningham has now been working on something called Federated Wiki, a very cool project that celebrated its 7th birthday this week. Wikipedia was launched in 2001 and in an era of rapidly increasing information warfare, there are few communities as experienced and prepared to help as the community of Wikipedia. Google, Facebook, and all of us should give it a lot more money.

One year ago this Summer, I was reading that first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, and thought – I want a wiki of my own!  And so my private, personal, mobile-responsive wiki was born.  (I use PMWiki software unloaded to my web host account.) It’s now my second-most visited site on the web (after Twitter) and I adore it so much! I put all my notes from reading in there, my notes from meetings, personal brainstorms, lots of things. I LOVE MY WIKI! I usually edit and read it on my phone. I love my “all recent pages” page, I love my “randomized list of 3 other pages” page.

I was talking to internet pioneer Howard Rheinghold about wikis on Twitter today, just because I noticed that we had discussed wikis on Twitter ten years ago in 2008! I brought the conversation back up, some other people joined in, we talked about what we needed today for a good wiki UI, and why it seems like wiki software development has slowed (Howard guesses Google Sites and Docs have filled a lot of the needs). It was great fun.

In celebration of the larger wiki world, here is a network map of 721 wiki experts, thought leaders, organizations, and more on Twitter. (zoomed in details below, graphs made by Little Bird, of Sprinklr) The accounts are the nodes, and the lines are a sample of the follow relationships between them. Sub-communities have formed where, for example, the community colored green was discovered by noticing that these people all follow each other more than they follow people in the yellow community. Flavors of wiki community – try them all!

Also notable, back in 2008 when Howard and I were talking on Twitter about wikis, only 123 out of 721 (17%) of these wiki community leaders had created their Twitter accounts yet! Ten years later, Twitter and at least Wikipedia are powerful, widely used platforms enabling public discourse. May many more wikis flourish in the coming years.  If you’d like some more inspiration, here are some people and organizations that are right in the thick of it!  Here are 500 of them in an easy-to-explore Twitter list.

Another good bot.

 

Simplicity, Gut, and Complex Decisions

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There’s a saying that simple decisions are best made with rational thought alone, but complex decisions benefit from a big dose of gut feeling as well.

I’ve been employing two methods for dealing with both types of decisions that I thought I’d share here.  I think of things like these as tools I can learn, practice with, get better at, and then deploy in my work.  I typically pick them up reading online, record them on my personal wiki page for reading notes, then transfer them monthly into a variable repetition mobile flashcard app where I review and learn them over time.

For simple, but hard, decisions, I’ve been using for several years a method I call “write it all down and pick 6.”  I learned it in a print edition of HBR that I picked up at an airport , I think it was Stanford’s Baba Shiv that suggested it but to be honest I didn’t write that part down!

The idea is: write down all the factors to take into consideration in your decision.  As many as you can possibly think of.  This feels great, like you’ve really given it a good thought.  Then, pick a very small number of those factors that are most important – at most 6.  Now look just at those 6 most important factors and honestly ask yourself what decision they support making.  This may be more powerful than it sounds.  It’s great.

Second, when you’ve got a complex decision, it can be helpful to break it down into simpler considerations first. “Simple is about relationships between individual people, objects, beings, truths,” writes Adrienne Marie Brown in her wonderful recent book Emergent Strategy.  “Part of what can clear a path to making things easier is to name the simple interactions at play in a complex system.”  Brown credits  Rachel Plattus of Beautiful Solutions with that insight.

That’s a new model I’m going to try out. If it’s a simple decision, use Pick 6.  If it’s a complex decision, try to create some simplicity by thinking about constituent relationships, then pick 6, then add gut feeling.  Gut feeling is high-bandwidth, high-context, powerful stuff too.

Related: The Conscious Competence model. When you start learning a new skill you are unconsciously incompetent, then consciously incompetent, then consciously competent with practice, until ultimately you can be unconsciously competent. Competent with far less effort.  That’s from Ed Batista’s blog post on Authenticity and Leadership.  Ed credits Martin Broadwell, a Bible teacher in Decatur, Georgia, who developed the Conscious Competence model in 1969.

Please share any related thoughts.  Thanks!