Breakfast Notes #81 (Hudson, Winning Wars, Best Practices)

Insightful Links of The Week

• Surviving the Hudson River. By now, you would have heard about the tragic deaths of those onboard the Titan submersible. Now, imagine if you had the chance to hear their final thoughts, what do you reckon they will say? On a typical January morning in 2009, an A320 leaving LaGuardia Airport in New York City struck a flock of birds and lost all engine power. But, against all odds, everyone on the flight survived. Listen to how Ric Elias, a passenger who saw the episode unfold offer his reflections. His speech brought to light how he like so many of us say we want to live in the moment but never do. It was only after such a harrowing experience that he learnt what truly matters and to fully immerse himself in the moment.
• How to Win the Next War. Safi Bahcall has a bold take on innovation. Most teams, no matter how good they are, suck at it. Culture is not the culprit, it's structure. In this blogpost, he outlines six patterns that he has seen across big organizations that prevent them from staying at the frontier of breakthroughs. My favourite one, happens to be a focus on big plans rather than small experiments. He argues that , 'Plans are comfortable because they can be debated and settled in committees, where no one person may be directly accountable.' However,  'many small experiments mean lots of failures tied to directly accountable people. Yet it’s only through rapid experimentation that we quickly and efficiently explore the boundaries of what’s possible.'
• GPT Best Practices. This is a good guide on what a good guide looks like and how best to use ChatGPT. Rather than tell you what you can do to better your ChatGPT usage, I want to tell you why this was a perfect example of what a 'best practices' manual should look like. The guide tells you the key operating principles you should follow, the reason for those principles and examples in spades. The best practice guide shouldn't just tell you how to 'hack' your way through but explain why their suggestions work best.

Visualization of The Week

For all those who continue to prophesy that the US is on the precipice of falling off, this chart shows how ahead the US is in churning the globe's most innovative companies.

May the sun shine upon your face and may you stay curious,

Keith