-
My Favorite Business and Political Podcasts
I am a Podcast addict. Walking around or in the car, I’m listening to one podcast or another. Right now I’m listening to about three hours of political podcasts per week and this week, I don’t think that’s going to be enough to contain all this chaos. But, I thought it was a good time to list my favorite podcasts in categories. Political Podcasts Most Informative: Pod Save America by Crooked Media. This podcast is hosed by Jon Favreau (the Obama speechwriter, not the IronMan director), Jon Lovett and more with special guest like the former White House Counsel and current members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Most…
-
Passion and Business
Passion. That’s what I learned about when I attended the 2017 Jazz and Heritage Festival in New Orleans this last weekend. Everywhere I looked, I saw performers loving what they were doing and concert-goers thrilled to be a part of the experience. In the Gospel tent local choirs moved the audience to tears and living legends like Irma Thomas completely transformed herself and the crowd by her presence. On some of the larger stages I saw fans listening to music not because the pop-music industry machine told them that they had to go see whatever the latest boy band was, but because they wanted to be there. They wanted to be transformed. The Crown…
-
Development without consumer input…
“But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers.” This very well-stated article in Bolt.io states one of the biggest issues I see in startups today – an idea without a market. It’s a great idea, but no one wants to buy it or certainly not at that price. It’s a supply and demand curve that never swipe right for each other. What Un-CEO features are in play here – mostly I’d say confirmation bias. No one went outside their little group to see if this idea would actually work in the real world. They stayed in their own bubble agreeing with…
-
Amazon Lambda – E-mail via SNS the URL of an S3 file when created
I threw together the following Lambda function to send an e-mail via SNS (Amazon’s Simple Notification Service) whenever a file is created in S3 (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service.) Yes, it’s barely commented and overly loggy, but you get the idea: 'use strict'; console.log('Loading function'); const aws = require('aws-sdk'); const s3 = new aws.S3({ apiVersion: '2006-03-01' }); exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => { //console.log('Received event:', JSON.stringify(event, null, 2)); // Get the object from the event and show its content type const bucket = event.Records[0].s3.bucket.name; const key = decodeURIComponent(event.Records[0].s3.object.key.replace(/\+/g, ' ')); const params = { Bucket: bucket, Key: key, }; s3.getObject(params, (err, data) => { if (err) { console.log(err); const…
-
Unroll.me ‘heartbroken’
On April 23, 2017, unroll.me posted a blog with a byline from Jojo Hedya – the CEO and co-founder at Unroll.me. In the blog, Jojo states that “it was heartbreaking to see that some of our users were upset to learn about how we monetize our free service.” Yes, if the service is free, then you (and your information) are probably what is being sold and unroll.me was no exception. How could the tenants of the un-CEO have helped Jojo? Treat your employees with respect and, just as importantly, treat your customers with respect. This is the time for the CEO to come clean with the customers. Actually, the time was well…
-
Welcome to the Un-CEO
Why are you here? Hopefully you’re here to learn. A reasonable person would see a track record of success and think that there could be something to be learned there. The problem, which hopefully you’ll learn here, is one of the most common biases, Survivorship Bias. Survivorship bias is when you only study the successes and not the failure and therefore potentially come to false conclusions based on only a sliver of the evidence. In a world of hype, I’m trying to promote critical thinking and a way to battle the hype. My goal is to add humanity and humility back to the role of CEO and to business management…
