We tell stories of work and tech and power and love and loss.
Consultants in Germany. Artificial Intelligence in Seattle. A startup in Mountain View. Books that we read so you don’t have to. An little entrepreneur who knows things her elders never will.
It’s a holiday for gratitude in the United States but a holiday for data in the rest of the world.
A Holiday for Data?
Three different groups have organized holidays for data and statistics: one for India, one for the continent of Africa and one for the world at large. You may think that they’re celebrating numbers but if you look closely at any one of them, you find that they are actually celebrating something a little more profound.
Take a break with our cast to celebrate the importance of data.
Cast (on Vacation):
You don’t, and that”s the point.
It’s the contract that holds you together. Not your history. Not your friendship. Not anything else.
The contract. Offer. Acceptance. Consideration. That’s it.
And what does that paper mean when things start moving fast, when you jump from one meeting to the next?
And what does it mean when the client, or perhaps a representative of the client, has ideas? Where does the contract end?
Fourth episode in a series on the ins and outs of tech consulting.
Cast:
You don’t, and that”s the point. None of know what we are doing when we going into a new organization. We don’t know the history. We don’t know the power structure. Sometimes, we don’t even know the goals. (And this will lead us to one of the key questions of this series: “Who are Leena and Klara?”) Occasionally , we don’t even know ourselves.
Our podcast consulting team has beens starting work in Hamburg. Anna’s replacing a key staff member and thinking about the future. Trouble is, she does not know all that the client is thinking and might not know what to do if she did.
Second episode in a series on the ins and outs of tech consulting.
Cast:
Things are never as clear as they seem. Never as obvious. Never as straightforward as you would like.
It should be simple. You get an idea. You make a product. You take it to the market. Let your customers decide for good or for ill.
But that simplicity masks the fundamental conflict. A conflict over goals. A conflict that is often deeply hidden in the acts and decisions of daily life.
Cast members Caraid O’Brien and Josh LaForce talk about the current series of the podcast and the challenges of preparing a podcast while driving through the streets of San Jose, California.
Cast:
Boards. Why do you need them? Just they don’t get in the way? The podcast How We Manage Stuff will soon start a new series that deals with technology, organizations and governance in a effort to help you understand how to bring new ideas to market. Cast Member Zoe Anastassiou and Geoffrey Grier
Cast:
Maddie the Entrepreneur / Herself – Zoe Anastassiou
When it falls apart, it just goes. You think you understand something. You got the idea right. You’re ready to act, to executive. Then all of a sudden, you realize that your approach has a flaw, a fundamental flaw. It would work perfectly well, IF you could have an infinite pile of turtles. Turtles, Turtles, all the way down.
If this doesn’t make sense, listen to Bix. He’ll make the idea clear.
Cast:
It’s not a question of smarts. It’s a question of how it got that way. A lot of the smart apps are fairly straight forward – classic computing ideas repackaged in a clever case. You start taking the p hone apart and you a lot of ideas that aren’t that clever experience t for the effort that it took to get them into that little case.
So we ask the question “How?” And of course, Anna has her ideas. Maybe she’s right. Maybe she’s not. But someone had to decide why the map app was important and why it was smart.
Anna and her crew take apart the smartphone as part of her series on Artificial Intelligence.
Cast:
