Duncan Stephen

Linknote — 12 December 2017 — 61 words

The story of one of the worst record covers of all time.

“During the photo shoot, Ted kept telling her to look serious, like her dad is talking to her,” Bult said. “But she just kept looking sad to me.”

When the final album was pressed, and Bult saw the finished product, he was livid.

Linknote — 11 December 2017 — 86 words

Business

[The most popular strategies companies use to save money also kill innovation](https://work.qz.com/1134910/six-sigma-and-other-popular-management-strategies-kill-innovation/)

An interesting take on business process improvements such as Lean and Six Sigma. It suggests that while such process improvements improve reliability, they also make innovation plummet. Moreover, the effects are difficult to spot because they take so long to emerge.

> Innovation requires different ways of doing things, and this is exactly what this system ends. But they don’t tell you that in the ISO9000 handbook, do they?

Linknote — 8 December 2017 — 184 words

Business

[When alumni interviewers screw up, things get weird](https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-Alumni-Interviewers-Screw/241835)

The perils of using alumni to reach out to prospective students.

This article mainly pertains to examples found in the US. I am not sure how common this technique is in the UK.

There is a tricky balance to be struck between two of universities’ main sources of income. On the one hand there is the need to keep alumni engaged, which is thought to make them more likely to donate. But if it turns off students — particularly the *right kind* of students — the long-term risks could be greater.

> Although highly selective colleges have become racially and socioeconomically diverse, alumni interviewers tend to be white and affluent. That can lead to awkward moments, said Ari Worthman, director of college counseling at Lakeside School, in Seattle. He recalled a low-income student who sat down with the graduate of a big-name college a couple of years ago. I’m so glad you’re looking at our school, the applicant was told, because we don’t normally interview students like you.

Linknote — 7 December 2017 — 124 words

Business

[Making good decisions as a product manager](https://blackboxofpm.com/making-good-decisions-as-a-product-manager-c66ddacc9e2b)

While this article was originally aimed at product managers, the author concedes that it is relevant to any role.

Essentially, it argues that the key to good decision-making is not just understanding what the correct decision would be, but also how quickly you should make each decision. In other words, you need to know which decisions to agonise over, and which to make quickly.

> You can be right 99% of the time, but if you’re wrong the 1% of times when it *really matters*, you’re not an effective decision maker. The takeaway is that when the stakes are high, you should work a lot harder at making the right decision.

Linknote — 6 December 2017 — 112 words

Technology

Ashamed to work in Silicon Valley: how techies became the new bankers

It definitely feels like there has been a sea-change in people’s perceptions about Silicon Valley in the past year or so. This article goes some way to explaining why.

MBA jerks used to go and work for Wall Street, now wealthy white geeks go to Stanford and then waltz into a VC or tech firm…

The focus of Silicon Valley used to be innovation with the wonderful bonus of money on the side of that, but those two things seem to have switched – just as the pencil-pushing mentality of finance in the 70s became the champagne lifestyle in the 2000s.

Linknote — 5 December 2017 — 38 words

Media

Secrets from the BBC newsroom

A delicious article by Robin Lustig. It recounts the time BBC Radio 4 newsreader Neil Sleat met “the ultimate challenge to his professional skills” with relish. His task? To pronounce the name Janice Keihanaikukauakahihuliheekahaunaele.

Linknote — 4 December 2017 — 145 words

Human-centred approaches — User experience

Hooked and booked

Following on from an article I linked to a few weeks ago about the dark patterns used by Booking.com to pressurise its users into making decisions, Jeremy Keith follows up with this reflection on why A/B testing used badly makes things worse.

A/B testing is a great way of finding out what happens when you introduce a change. But it can’t tell you why.

Part of this is also about a narrow focus on the wrong metrics. If a business decides it simply wants to increase the percentage of people hitting a partiuclar call to action on a webpage, this is the path they will end up on.

If, however, they can find a more sophisticated way to measure long-term customer satisfaction, surely users will feel less stressed, and the business will improve more in the long run.