Think pieces

Agencies serve an extremely important purpose. They bring fresh, bright talent with an outside perspective and have the capacity to explore and innovate in ways that in-house teams do not. As AI forces us to separate creativity (humans) and execution (machines), new innovative workflows will naturally emerge. Human-AI co-worker teams will attend to these workflows and all of this will require leadership to evolve.

The manager's schedule is for bosses. It's embodied in the traditional appointment book, with each day cut into one hour intervals. You can block off several hours for a single task if you need to, but by default you change what you're doing every hour.

Most powerful people are on the manager's schedule. It's the schedule of command.

How do we manage to advise so many startups on the maker's schedule? By using the classic device for simulating the manager's schedule within the maker's: office hours.

When you're operating on the manager's schedule you can do something you'd never want to do on the maker's: you can have speculative meetings.

ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off.

I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me.

Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. Brian Eno suggested the word to convey the extreme creativity that groups, places or “scenes”  can occasionally generate. His actual definition is:  “Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”