Six quick links for Friday evening

Simplify update meetings. Replace the typical unproductive staff meetings that could be handled via email with participatory “mini-pitch” sessions. This format can help team members practice concisely explaining their work, ensure everyone understands the team’s priorities, enable quicker identification of issues, and promotes cross-team collaboration.

Strategy at Human Scale. Companies need standardisation, compartmentalisation, and subordination. At the same time, they need to rethink these practices to be more “human-scale” by enhancing connection to the customer in a way that makes employees feel like willing participants rather than cogs in a machine.

Path dependence and identifying seedlings. “if you’re patient, if you don’t try to fight nature too much, and if you can let go of a rigid vision of the ideal outcome in favor of allowing things to emerge […] we can learn what to nurture and what to eradicate”

The science behind DORA. I’m using DORA metrics more regularly now to measure how we’re tracking towards our engineering objectives. I’ve tried all sorts of ways to do this, and I keep coming back to DORA surveys that are so simple and grounded in a mix of scientific rigor and practical considerations.

Sequoia Capital has doubts AI will be profitable any time soon, if ever. There’s at least a US$500Bn revenue shortfall between what the AI industry needs to break even, and what the major players could even dream of generating (via The Sizzle).

Merlin Bird ID. We’re using this app on our vacation. With a location-aware catalogue and a few simple questions, it’s been almost trivial to identify all sorts of birds.