Both Hugh and I agree, that it is time to use this platform again.
COVID-19 and cell phone data tracking is a Privacy Paradox par excellence! The the concept originally encapsulated how we were willing to trade-off the sharing of one’s data for the use of a ‘free’ social media platform. We kinda’ knew that our data were being sold off to third parties, and traded by data brokers, and we sorta let it go, so we reacted by setting up some add blockers, adjusting our settings, using VPNs, or changing our browsers to things like DuckDuckGo. As imperfect as that situation was and is, that is what we did and it is what we do.
But cell phone tracking is something quite different.
Helen Nissembaum‘s Contextual Integrity (CI) is a very useful framework to think this through, for her “privacy, defined as CI, is preserved when information flows generated by an action or practice conform to legitimate contextual informational norms; it is violated when they are breached“. There are four CI theses as follows:
Thesis 1: Privacy is the Appropriate Flow of Personal Information
Thesis 2: Appropriate Flows Conform with Contextual Informational Norms (“Privacy Norms”)
Thesis 3: Five Parameters Define Privacy (Contextual Informational) Norms: Subject, Sender, Recipient, Information Type, and Transmission Principle
Thesis 4: The Ethical Legitimacy of Privacy Norms is Evaluated in Terms of: A) Interests of Affected Parties, B) Ethical and Political Values, and C) Contextual Functions, Purposes, and Values.
In terms of norms, social media is one thing, we do get upset when we find out that our photos are being used for facial recognition by our law enforcement institutions, when behaviour is tracked for targeted marketing purposes by data brokers or worse when scurrilous actors use our data to disrupt democracy. But our cell phone data, that is another level! We also know about UBER and smart phone provider transgressions but we seem to know very little about the Murkyness of Telecom Surveillance. Furthermore, we are beginning to realize, that we cannot Privacy By Design (PbD) our way out of this, nor is cybersecurity enough, and that institutional and technological solutionism, falls short! We need to figure out how to govern these data practices right now.
These are exceptional times, circumstances are exceptional, the stakes are high, and the norms they are a changin’ . CI helps frame our thinking, although, Nissembaum also realizes that her thesis may need to reconsider how technology is an actor, while Teresa Scassa in Private Sector Data, Privacy and Pandemics and Michael Geist both warn us about the new normal, they also define and categorize types of data in a pandemic situation to help us out, frame their analysis with issues pertaining to law, policy and governance, and provide ways to circumscribe how these data might be shared to serve the public good or interest at this time.
But, who will govern this, and for long will this ‘sharing’ & tracking go on for?
What is for sure, just like 911 set new benchmarks in terms of what kind of surveillance we wound up ‘living with’, COVID-19 will change data and technological monitoring norms. This may also be a time where we might change the course what surveillance we will accept, as presumably we are smarter now! There are perils and there are opportunities. How will we govern ourselves and our data during and post the pandemic era!
Below is a smattering of news articles on the topic:
Je viens de faire un petit tour dans le quartier avec mes jambes et mes bâtons. Peu de monde, beaucoup de calme. J’ai toujours aimé les dimanches et les jours fériés, ici, où tout est fermé et rien ne bouge.
Cette période c’est comme un dimanche, mais tous les jours.
C’est trompeur, pourtant. En fait, cette crise n’est pas également distribuée. Elle nous touche tous, nous bouleverse tous, mais alors que certains se trouvent ralentis voire arrêtés, d’autres ne savent plus où donner de la tête. Je pense aux soignants évidemment, mais aussi aux parents télétravailleurs, aux employés des supermarchés, aux profs qui doivent du jour au lendemain apprendre à enseigner à distance (si possible autrement que “je donne des exercices, ils font, je corriger”), à tous ceux dont le revenu est en train de s’évaporer et qui doivent dare-dare trouver des solutions pour payer les employés et les charges, ou simplement remplir le frigo.
On commence à le lire, femmes et hommes ne sont pas non plus frappés équitablement. Les femmes assument la plus grande part des soins et de l’aide à autrui. (Oui je sais qu’il y a des hommes aidants, mais regardons les choses à l’échelle de la population.)
It does feel like perpetual Sunday, these pandemic days, and the particular kind of Sunday is different for every person, every family.
I’ve seen dozens of clients spend countless time roping in marketing, PR, and legal teams to collaborate on a post (or response) few people will ever see.
This doesn’t mean the person didn’t deserve a response (or you shouldn’t make the post). It simply means it’s not a good use of everyone’s time.
If your average discussion is viewed by 30 people and you’re spending hours collaborating on it, that doesn’t make sense.
It’s perfectly ok to reply with ‘this is too complex an issue to respond here, we’ll contact you privately to help’.
The exception is when a lot of people will see it. This means the issue is rapidly gaining traction or you’re planning on sending (or highlighting the response) to your entire mailing list. Then it’s worth spending a lot of time on it indeed.
It is a bit like an endless Sunday yes. The empty streets, and until now the sunshine. Except maybe for the deluge of conference calls I get pulled into, which is more akin to fighting flood waters at the front door. Need to find me some digital twins to sand bags.
The perpetual Sunday feeling made me realise I now have a better notion of how the cats feel when we are away for a few days. When we get back home and they wake-up on the couch and stretch out it’s like they say “this has been a really long weekend….”. It will be weeks, if not months before we get to do that stretching. Perpetual Sundays, now there’s a title for a podcast.
Je viens de faire un petit tour dans le quartier avec mes jambes et mes bâtons. Peu de monde, beaucoup de calme. J’ai toujours aimé les dimanches et les jours fériés, ici, où tout est fermé et rien ne bouge.
Cette période c’est comme un dimanche, mais tous les jours.....
I continue to believe that living in a surveillance society is incompatible in the long term with liberty. But a prerequisite of liberty is physical safety. If temporarily conscripting surveillance capitalism as a public health measure offers us a way out of this crisis, then we should take it, and make full use of it. At the same time, we should reflect on why such a powerful surveillance tool was instantly at hand in this crisis, and what its continuing existence means for our long-term future as a free people.
I’ve been on a trail for a few days, trying to figure out what happens in the Netherlands around #COVID19 testing. The information I can get to and my understanding of the situation change very fast and do not lend itself to a well-balanced analysis, but I find it important to get it out now, before it changes further. In this text I share three things: something that made me cry, something I question as a scientist and something I find unacceptable.
Most of the sources are in Dutch – see links in this text and posts on FB (1, 2). I may fix typos and add links after this text is published, but will try to keep the essence intact.
RIVM, The National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, is the key player defining the rules for understanding and fighting the epidemic. Those tweets came after days of searching for information of why there is so little testing in the Netherlands, not finding the numbers and being stuck with the official explanation “we are making the best use of very limited test materials”.
In essence, institutional belief about the limited value of testing made it into country-wide health policy. There are enough scientists at RIVM, so I guess this belief is there because they have other instruments to get insights about the epidemiological situation in the country. The problem is that those instruments were not useful to predict the current crisis despite all international examples and they are still used as a decision-making instrument now, as yesterday’s presentation to the parliament illustrates.
And this is what I question as a scientist. RIVM does not see a value of testing wide, but instead rely on sampling across the country and on the models that could be very sensitive to the data and the assumptions used. Here I comment on two issues that I find particularly questionable.
The first one is about the capabilities of RIVM to have a representative picture of the epidemic situation in the Netherlands based on their data collection methods. Their presentation to the parliament on 25 March shows three sources of data (slide 2):
number of registered patients (5560 total) that includes those who were treated in a hospital (1495), were in intensive care (482) and died (276)
number of positive tests (5150)
number of cases found via NIVEL monitoring network (15)
The first two represent only the tip of the iceberg: mainly people with severe symptoms and/or risk groups that are eligible for testing under the current policies. To give you an idea of those policies: four people in our family had a fever above 38.5, cough and other symptoms and a second-degree contact with somebody tested positive. All of us are in the “mild symptoms” category where testing to isolate COVID19 cases from ordinary flu cases is not considered relevant by RIVM.
The last measurement comes from a monitoring system of NIVEL, national institute for health services research (for those reading in Dutch Ton has links to explore). It includes data from around 40 of GP practices and tests for various infections from a smaller selection of testing facilities (more details in Dutch, report for week 12). The following is relevant for us here:
reporting and testing facilities are not evenly distributed – see those dots on the map
tests are done for a subset of patients who reported the symptoms – 11% of all with the symptoms according to NIVEL update for week 11
the average number of total tests is below 100 for a week – 576 tests done in 8 weeks; slide 2, also NIVEL report week 12
Statistics like that might be good enough to monitor the overall health situation in the country, but they are not giving a representative picture of how an epidemic is developing. That is especially true early in the process when cases are unevenly distributed and the numbers are too low to detect by sampling. Emergent clusters of infection are easy to miss if they happen at the location where data is not collected (how knew that testing in Brabant and not along A1 is needed?).
Putting the maps on NIVEL data and actual cases from now (slides 2 and 3) next to each other illustrates that. Look, for example, at Flevopolder (big “island” in the middle) – there are no cases with NIVEL sampling while the actual number of infections gets into mid-range.
As far as I could judge, the data sources that RIVM uses as a basis for their decision-making show only the tip of the iceberg. Severe cases are known, but there is no good picture of the mild cases and there is hardly any data on asymptomatic cases, and those too mild to be reported to GPs. Which brings me to another point of the presentation today: the scenario of targeted lock-down that seems to be what RIVM suggests as a way to proceed (slide 16).
In essence, this is a way to slow down the spread of infection without broad testing and tracing of actual cases and without total lock-down. This scenario relies on visible flu symptoms and on citizens following the advice to quarantine the whole family as long as one of the members has those symptoms.
Both of those are assumptions that could be modelled in different ways and in both cases, there are too many unknown factors that make those models not particularly reliable.
As we already saw RIVM doesn’t have much data on asymptomatic cases, so it can not predict how the infection will spread via those. And it is exactly those cases that create risks for vulnerable groups if they come into contact with asymptomatic healthcare professionals or others in essential roles (assuming that all others practice social distancing).
The second unknown is predicting how many households will self-quarantine in practice without knowing what is behind their symptoms.
Despite all the official recommendations on social distancing and extra emergency notification last weekend there were a lot of people in public spaces not following this advice. The measures are tightened now, but I do not expect that all households would be complying with self-isolation that is much more difficult to control than not keeping distance in public.
Another challenge is the overall culture in the Netherlands – mild symptoms of cold of flu were not considered a reason good enough to skip work or school just two weeks ago (and this is still true for the people in essential roles now). Expecting that people would change so fast, especially knowing that they might be locked in a house “for nothing” since they were not tested. Messages of RIVM that relatively small part of the symptoms are actually from coronavirus do not help to feel the gravity of the situation.
Of course, researchers who work on RIVM models are smart and they probably accounted in one or another way for those factors. The problem is that there is not so much known about the virus itself and no other country was so inventive to go for targeted lock-down without testing, so I do not expect that those models could be validated with the actual data. I also do not know if any of the modelling scenarios that suppose to inform Dutch government were discussed in a scientific community outside of RIVM network and would withstand the scrutiny of peer review.
Which brings me to my last point of this very long text: what I can not accept.
My writing in public on this topic started from comments to the post of Ton Zylstra (Waar is de RIVM data? Zodat we zelf beter in actie kunnen komen!) that describes how little RIVM makes available to the public and how lack of communication about their work does not help trust and cooperation from the public so much needed in the current crisis.
I am sure there is a lot of expertise in RIVM and the aim is to use it in the best possible way. The problem is that researchers and other experts are human: they do not know everything, they make mistakes and approximate uncertainties, they can be entrenched in a research paradigm that does not work when the situation changes dramatically.
When those human qualities are part of policies and actions at the state level lack of transparency prevents scrutiny by external peers or concerned public and it costs lives – not only of the patients that do not get help because it was not predicted reliably by a model, but also those of doctors who get infected by an untested asymptomatic carrier or collapse under the pressure of choosing which lives are worth saving.
Slack’s not specifically a “work from home” tool; it’s more of a “create organizational agility” tool. But an all-at-once transition to remote work creates a lot of demand for organizational agility.
As the customer perspective becomes the driving force behind many business process shifts, we continue to see innovations in the space. Nearly every possible aspect of customer interaction is being broken down and developed into new ways to provide service. If you haven’t already, we recommend you take a look at our introductions to customer service, customer relations, and customer success. In this post, we'll explore customer service experience, which represents an expanded perspective of traditional service activities.
The vast majority of companies today are competing primarily based on customer experience (CX). As a primary source of differentiation, CX continues to dominate many discussions in the customer service space. Customer service experience encompasses all the individual interactions that a customer has with your company, both in-person and online. When thinking about this, all points of contact should be considered, including social media, websites, email, and even self-service platforms. This post will help explain how service and experience are combined to help maintain timely support and provide a positive experience across all of these channels.
Customer Experience and Customer Service
When many people think of customer service, they picture a room filled with agents who are interacting with customers or answering calls. While this may be the traditional format of service activities, the dynamic in the market is changing. Many companies are now starting with customer experience as the primary way to understand their customers, both as segments and as individual consumers, and develop strategies for ensuring a positive experience throughout every interaction.
Your customer experience is the sum of all interactions, referred to as touchpoints, that a customer has with your brand over time. Customer service experience considers all customer-facing service activities and individual interactions. Companies should focus on customer service experience as a company-wide strategic priority because its scope goes far beyond any one person or department.
Why is Customer Service Experience Important?
Whenever a customer interacts with your company, there is an opportunity to satisfy or disappoint. Since consumers today have such high expectations for service quality, managing your customer service experience is as vital as ever. According to Martech Advisor, there are several crucial service factors that are meaningful to customers, including:
Ease of access to service
Speed of response to customers
Efficiency in resolving the issue
Effectiveness of the resolution
Friendliness of human or bot agents
Friendly user interface (whether it's display or phone-based)
Post-service feedback and follow-up
An effective customer service strategy must address all of these factors, and a failure to deliver on any one of them can lead to dissatisfaction and lost business. An optimized customer service experience will build trust, develop long-term relationships, and help a brand differentiate itself from competitors.
How Can I Develop Better Customer Service Experience?
Your customer service activities center around your help-desk staff, email, social media, and self-service interactions. With so many touchpoints to manage these days, the only way to be effective is to organize your capabilities so that you can get the most value out of individual resources.
Omnichannel Communication
While a company can manage customer service with a single-channel platform, it is often not realistic today. Gartner estimates that 90% of companies use social media for customer service in 2020. One of the best ways to manage your communications across platforms is to take advantage of a shared inbox. With a shared inbox, your team can process requests from a central platform and focus more of their time on providing a meaningful experience for customers.
Leveraging a shared inbox allows customer service teams to assign tickets to the right agents, comment on and discuss tickets, and share and review draft responses before sending replies to customers. Ignored support requests and forgotten emails can quickly turn a positive customer service experience into a negative one. A shared inbox ensures that emails and support requests never fall through the cracks, so your support team will never miss those all-important follow-ups.
Self-Service and Automation
The more time that your staff deals with manual entry and other small tasks, the less time they have available to focus on customers. When automation tools are successfully integrated with your help desk platform, you can streamline a number of processes.
Another great way to improve the customer service experience is to offer a customer portal that can be used to manage a variety of self-service functions. These often include a knowledge base, support request status updates, and access to customer-specific information.
Personalizing Every Interaction
While scripts and templates can save a lot of time and ensure that responses cover all the bases, you want to make sure that your staff does not rely on them entirely. It is imperative to train staff and help them understand how to make customers feel appreciated. Even remembering a customer’s name or referencing past communications can demonstrate that you care about the relationship.
Excellent customer service experience isn't just about what you do to meet customers' needs, but how you go about it. Personalized interactions, demonstrating empathy, offering proactive solutions, and providing easy access to easy to use customer service options are all key factors that make your business stand out from the crowd.
Customer service experience will continue to be a priority for companies that are looking to engage with customers in a more meaningful way. It is an essential point of differentiation and offers a tremendous opportunity for businesses that can expand their traditional view of service to look at all the potential touchpoints that a customer can have with their brand.
This story is built around the idea that the system of regulating 'unexcused absences' is unnecessary because parents can determine what's best for their child. It misrepresents the original purpose of such regulations, which was to prevent parents from using children as free labour instead of sending them to school. Now, in general, it may be that there are many unneeded regulations. But many of those are designed to protect the rights and interests of children, and cannot be willed away by a pollyannish disposition or competency-based schooling. Without strong and enforceable regulations to protect children, any move away from the current system must be looked at with necessary scepticism.
Today's new word is 'Zoombombing'. This happens when an uninvited person shares their screen to an unsuspecting meeting. The content of the shared screen is typically offensive (though I suppose sharing cat photos would still count as Zoombombing). It exists because Zoom meetings are open by default, and because screeen-sharing is turned on for everyone by default. To prevent it, turn off screen sharing. And if you're worried about random people dropping in on your Zoom meeting, add a password requirement. Finally, as with other events of this type, I would imagine that the hysterical reporting is all out of proportion to the actual rate of incidence.
Waffle House announced it was closing hundreds of stores this week due to SARS-Cov-2 (a.k.a COVID-19). This move garnered quite a bit of media attention since former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate used the restaurant chain as both an indicator of the immediate and overall severity of a natural disaster. [He’s not the only one](https://www.ehstoday.com/emergency-management/article/21906815/what-do-waffles-have-to-do-with-risk-management. The original concept was pretty straightforward:
For example, if a Waffle House store is open and offering a full menu, the index is green. If it is open but serving from a limited menu, it’s yellow. When the location has been forced to close, the index is red. Because Waffle House is well prepared for disasters, Kouvelis said, it’s rare for the index to hit red. For example, the Joplin, Mo., Waffle House survived the tornado and remained open.
“They know immediately which stores are going to be affected and they call their employees to know who can show up and who cannot,” he said. “They have temporary warehouses where they can store food and most importantly, they know they can operate without a full menu. This is a great example of a company that has learned from the past and developed an excellent emergency plan.”
SARS-Cov-2 is not a tropical storm, so conditions are a bit different and a tad more complex when it comes to basing severity of this particular disaster (mostly caused by inept politicians across the globe), which gave me an idea for how to make the Waffle House Index a proper index, i.e. a _”statistical measure of change in a representative group of individual data points.”_1.
In the case of an outbreak, rather than a simple green/yellow/red condition state, using the ratio of closed to open Waffle House locations as a numeric index — [0-1] — seems to make more sense since it may better help indicate:
when shelter-in-place became mandatory where a given restaurant is located
the severity of SARS-Cov-2-caused symptoms for a given location
disruptions in the supply chain for a given location due to SARS-Cov-2
I kinda desperately needed a covidistraction so I set out to see how hard it would be to build such an index metric.
Waffle House lets you find locations via a standard map/search interface. They provide lots of data via that map which can be used to figure out which stores are open and which are closed. There’s a nascent R package which contains all the recipes necessary for the data gathering. However, you don’t need to use it, since it powers wafflehouseindex.us which is collecting the data when the store closings info changes and provides a snapshot of the latest data daily (direct CSV link).
The historical data will make it to a git repo at some point in the near future.
The current index value is 21.2, which increased quickly after the first value of 18.1 (that event was the catalyst for getting the site up and package done) and the closed locations are on the map at the beginning of the post. I went with three qualitative levels on the gauge mostly to keep things simple.
There will absolutely be more location closings and it will be interesting (and, ultimately, very depressing and likely grave) to see how high the index goes and how long it stays above zero.
FIN
The metric is — for the time being — computed across all stores. As noted earlier, this could be broken down into regional index scores to intuit the aforementioned three indicators on a more local level. The historical data (apart from the first closings announcement) is being saved so it will be possible to go back and compute regional indexes when I’ve got more time.
I shall reiterate that you should grab the data from http://wafflehouseindex.us/data/latest.csv vs use the R package since there’s no point in dup’ing the gathering and the historical data will be up and maintained soon.
“His clothes shall be torn and his head bared, and he shall cover his mustache and cry ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ … and he shall dwell alone; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.”
These orders for quarantine, drawn from Leviticus, in the Old Testament, are a little more dramatic than the directive issued last week by California’s governor, Gavin Newsom (“I as the state public health officer and director of the California Department of Public Health order all individuals living in the state of California to stay home”), which has been followed by plenty of other elected leaders. But the basic idea—separating people to avoid mass infection—is the same. Indeed, the idea of separating the sick from the well is so old that it predates our scientific understanding of the causes of disease.
A height-adjustable standing desk helps you cycle between sitting and standing throughout your workday, which is essential for both your comfort and your health. After spending 65 hours testing four of the top standing desks, we think the Uplift V2-Commercial Standing Desk is the one to get. It accommodates a wide range of heights, it’s stable at even its tallest standing heights, and it features a variety of attractive customization options.
Plague dinner #7: rösti potatoes (because we’re watching The Restuarant/Vår tid är nu), grilled ribeye. Shiraz/Viognier. Brownies. Happy birthday to my beloved.
and so it begins....
Ventured outside for first time, risking peril in order to acquire food. Rationing of eggs, milk, tomato sauce. Bread flour unavailable in the market, not even for ready money.
It wouldn’t be pretty, but we might be able to hold out for a month.
I told the cashier, “Thank you for your service.” I believe this wrong to say to ex-military (ww2 excepted) but apt for grocery store personnel who continue to work despite the risk.
The apparent indifference of local leaders to the looming catastrophe is alarming: while we face mass deaths, they fiddle at the margins with errand running and sewing ineffective masks. We need 16000 ventilators next week, but people seem to assume that someone else will take care of it. We need a million N95 respirators right now; the leaders are asking people to check their closets.
This focus on minutiae in the face of catastrophe baffles me. “Do your job” is good advice for normal plays, but not now: today, it’s “someone tackle that guy or we will lose the game and the season.” Is the seeming indifference a catholic assumption that God will provide, or that we should give up because it is all in His hands?
We are facing a terrible reckoning.
People who should know better are spreading misinformation. Don’t do that. If you are distributing information and any detail is wrong, fix it. If you’re not sure, do the research or call someone who can.
Urbandoo hat probiert, Dienstags und Freitags neue Artikel einzustellen und wurde dann von Armleuchtern überrannt, die 30 bis 40 Artikel auf einmal gekauft haben.
New Rules:
Wir lagern wieder täglich ein, beginnend am Samstag. Wer sich für einen bestimmten urbandoo per Benachrichtigungsfunktion auf der Webseite vormerken ließ, erhält automatisch in der Reihenfolge der Vormerkung eine Mail. Anschliessend haben die Informierten 4h Zeit, die Einladung zum Bestellen anzunehmen. Anschließend stehen die Schals zur freien Verfügung.
Meine Empfehlung: Sucht Euch jetzt was aus und lasst Euch mit Mailadresse vormerken.
As coronavirus sweeps the globe, we are on the precipice of what could become the worst financial downturn of our lifetimes. While we have leapt to address the growing public health crisis, we need to be equally proactive about what’s next: 2020 will be a year of near certain recession, if not depression.
As we rush to slow the pace of viral contagion, the tinders of economic contagion are igniting. Just like our healthcare workers are racing to prevent a health catastrophe, our business community must likewise rally to stem the impending economic ramifications.
The health crisis caused by COVID-19, itself devastating and overwhelming, is creating a demand shock of untold proportions. Social distancing — while good for our health — has slammed the brakes on revenues, the fuel for all businesses (and ultimately all institutions, including governments).
Few businesses are prepared to forego 70% or more of their revenues for a month — much less into summer. While the impacts will vary by sector and company, many businesses will be ravaged. Good, well-run, vital businesses. Even the strongest balance sheets cannot withstand a shock like this.
Despite governments’ jumping in to pass stimulus packages, businesses can’t wait. Companies need to configure their businesses to survive the “pause” caused by shelter-in-place restrictions, while also streamlining to face a recessionary market on the other side.
Download the full PDF.
The key objective: increase resilience. To paraphrase Vietnam POW James Stockdale: Resilience means striking a balance between facing the “brutal truth” of how bad things can get, while also retaining confidence that you will survive to see the other side. Companies need to build the necessary agility to get through tough near-term conditions, while keeping an eye on the horizon to build perspective on what will matter as the crisis ebbs.
Here are eight tangible steps every company should take to position itself for what lies ahead:
First, act quickly — and invest the right resources.
While companies have rushed to address the coronavirus threat itself, far fewer have taken the next step: understanding and addressing the impending demand shock, as revenues fall and recession takes hold. Start now. Start yesterday. Separate the necessary public health precautions you’ve already taken from actions to preserve the business itself. Both are vital, but don’t confuse the two. There is no more important action for your business than having a business preservation plan.
Importantly, this is not another task for an overburdened COVID-19 response team. It is someone’s (multiple someones’) full-time job. Pick a great leader. Create an action team. Set up a “war room.” Work closely with the senior team. If you don’t have seasoned resources that know how to address financial distress, hire them. The best money you can spend is developing a crisis plan. It is the business equivalent of buying n95 masks.
Second, make cash king.
First and foremost preserve cash. Cut non-essential spending. Delay capital investment. Shut down businesses or initiatives that aren’t mission critical. Deploy teams to drive rapid cost cutting where you need it. This is a force majeure moment: Review your contracts and renegotiate terms with suppliers. Finally, forget about making a plan: Plan is a “thrive metric.” You need a “survive” metric: economic breakeven.
Third, drive revenue resilience.
Many companies will see a huge drop in revenues in the near term. What can you do to shore up your revenue structure? If you are one of the lucky few to have a crisis-driven demand spike, capture it quickly — you will need every dollar you earn now to cushion you as recession sets in, and consumer spending drops. Some key steps: Ensure continuity of existing business where possible. Reallocate resources so that your best talent is focused on the highest priorities. Pivot offerings to make these more relevant. Rethink your go-to-market approaches, by refocusing routes to market, redirecting your sales pipeline, and honing marketing messages.
Fourth, share the pain.
The better you maintain your ecosystem of business partners, the faster you will rebound on the other side. Approach negotiations with vendors, customers, creditors, and employees in the spirit of collaboration. Work with vendors to slow payables. Ask lenders to forego interest payments. To minimize layoffs, ask employees to work for a period at lower salary or part-time. Work with government agencies to delay taxes or forego tariffs. Compromise will be key to everyone’s survival.
Fifth, embrace uncertainty.
The tools you normally rely on to gauge performance don’t work in this environment. No one knows what the next six months hold. Don’t resist uncertainty; instead, lean in. Identify key exposures. Scan your business for risks. Use tools like scenario planning to understand potential eventualities. What are second and third order effects? And don’t make this a drawn-out affair: A few hours will give you insights that will be game changing. Pause, think, organize: It will dramatically improve your decision making.
Sixth, identify action levers.
Understand key near-term levers in your business. Prioritize them:
Reversible levers: What actions can you take now that are easily reversed? For example, delay Capex or postpone non-essential employee training. Pull as many of these as you reasonably can.
Hard-to-pull levers that don’t threaten the future of the business: What are “nice to haves,” not “need to haves”? Now is the time to make hard calls you have put off: Eliminate programs that aren’t adding value, streamline processes, shut down lagging businesses. Innovate your operating model to be lighter, more agile, and more responsive. Preserve key strategic initiatives as best you can – you need to keep an eye on where you want to be when this is all done.
Levers of last resort: What are the “Hail Mary’s” that could save the company in an extreme scenario? This may include selling assets or making deep layoffs. Identify these early. Define the circumstances that would force a decision. Plan how you would execute. Be prepared. The more thoughtful you are now, the more you will minimize collateral damage later.
The hardest decision any leader faces is laying off employees. If layoffs become necessary, do it. Do it with grace and compassion, but do it. Too many businesses wait too long and cause the broader enterprise to capsize — making the pain deeper than it needs to be and the job losses bigger than they should have been.
Seventh, think beyond the current crisis, now.
Financial crises are like forest fires: They ravage an economy, creating destruction in their wake. But, once the flames subside, there is resurgence — green shoots poking through the ashes.
One reason to act now, to preserve cash, and to become agile is to capture the green shoots when they sprout. Or even to plant them as the fires rage. (As Apple did launching the iPod in the 2001 downturn. Or as Adobe did, testing its SaaS platform in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis.)
Inevitably, assets will come up for sale at good prices, and new business models will emerge. There will be opportunities to take market share and to innovate to meet emerging needs. Test new product offerings. Great talent will be looking for new homes, and capital equipment and manufacturing capacity will be offered at fire-sale prices. Some of these opportunities may become available soon. If you have the agility to be an acquirer or an innovator, what’s your wishlist? The future will indeed be different, and many of the implied assumptions under which your company operates may need overhaul or revision. Develop a point of view on this so that you can be proactive when the moment is right. For companies with resilience and clear strategies, there will be many game-changing opportunities.
Eighth, be kind.
The economic impact of this downturn will be massive. Bills won’t get paid. Loans will default. Companies will go bankrupt. People will lose their jobs. After 12 years of economic recovery, this will be a hard shock. And there will be very real human impacts.
Heartbreaking impacts. Be empathetic, be responsive. But also know that as a company the single best thing you can do is survive. To jumpstart an economic recovery, we need as many businesses left standing as possible. The economy needs you. Society needs you. We need you to be there to do what you do best—provide goods, services, and most of all, jobs.
About the Authors
Patrick Viguerie is the Managing Partner of Innosight. He previously was a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.
Elizabeth Stephenson most recently served as the President of The FIJI Water Group and POM Wonderful. She previously was a partner at McKinsey & Company.
Patrick and Elizabeth worked together for more than a decade to build McKinsey’s macro- economic and trends capability, and helped develop the McKinsey response to the 2008 Financial Crisis.
About Innosight
Innosight is a strategy and innovation consulting firm that helps organizations navigate disruptive change and manage strategic transformation. Now a member of the Huron Consulting Group, we work with leaders to create new growth strategies, accelerate critical innovation initiatives, and build innovation capabilities. Discover how we can help your organization navigate disruption at www.innosight.com.
Germany has decided that saving lives is more important than saving face. In a rather undiplomatic letter to German citizens in Japan posted on the Embassy Of Germany’s web site on March 24, the embassy did not mince words in discussing Japan’s poor handling of coronavirus testing. It warns that we should assume there are a high number of unreported carriers.
While noting that there is a possibility that German citizens might be entirely banned from entering Japan, the letter urges German citizens to exercise caution in coming to the country or staying. It notes that “For Germans and other EU citizens, visa-free travel to Japan is suspended until the end of April . New applications are possible, but the granting of visas is restricted.”
The most interesting passage is below. The brevity and beauty of the German language makes it a wonderfully chilling dense read.
“Das Infektionsrisiko in Japan ist nicht seriös einzuschätzen. Von einer hohen Dunkelziffer von Infektionen, bedingt durch die geringe Zahl durchgeführter Tests, ist auszugehen. COVID-19 Testmöglichkeiten gibt es weiterhin nur für bereits schwer erkrankte Personen (Symptome und 4 Tage hohes Fieber) und für Personen mit anderweitigem Anfangsverdacht (Kontakt zu Infizierten, Aufenthalte in Risikogebieten)”
It could be translated several ways. Please feel free to submit your own translation!
Here is one interpretation/translation by a German scholar.
“The [stated] risk of infection [from coronavirus] in Japan cannot be believed. A high number of non-reported cases can be expected, due to the low rate of testing. The possibility of being tested for the coronavirus continue only to be available for those who are very sick (four days of high fever) and for persons with other risk factors (contact to others infected, [those who have stayed] stay in high-risk areas.”
The first sentences strictly translated reads as follows:
“The risk of infection in Japan cannot be assessed seriously. It can be assumed that there are high number of unreported infections due to the small number of tests carried out.”
In the first line, “Nicht serious” can be translated as “not serious”–as in untruthful, mendacious.
Let us further translate the full two paragraphs above from diplomatic understatement to colloquial English.
“Japan is lying. No one can fucking believe what they’re saying, because how can they know if they don’t test? They are barely testing. They only test you if you meet super-stringent criteria. We’re going to see a surge in the numbers if they ever get off their asses and actually test people for the disease. Assume (auszugehen) there a lot of coronavirus carriers out there in Japan.”
My Social Studies teachers used to say, “You should never ‘assume’ because it makes an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me'”, but in this case we are all assuming the German Embassy in Tokyo is correct. As of March 2nd, Japan averaged 72 tests for coronavirus per million. Korea averaged 4099.
Things have slightly improved, as of March 20th, Japan had moved up to 117.8 corona virus tests per million people. Have a look at the chart—it’s an abysmal figure. You might mistake it for a visual representation of Japan’s gender equality ranking, which ranks at an all-time low of 121 out of 153 companies. In a positive sense, if sexual discrimination was something to be proud of, Japan would be in the top tier.
Japan ranks miserably in testing for the coronavirus, 118 people per million. In fact, it’s ranking for testing is so low, it resembles the nation’s ranking on gender equality, 121 out of 153 nations. In cover-ups and sexism, Japan leads the pack.
Everybody knows in Japan there’s no visible coronavirus epidemic because Japan generally doesn’t test people for it. It’s an obstacle course designed to prevent you from reaching the goal line of getting tested and possibly embarrassing the nation by making infection rates higher.
On the surface Japan is handling the coronavirus epidemic just fine, but trouble lies out of sight.
On March 18th, the Japan Medical Association announced that there were 290 cases of doctors deciding that a patient needed to be tested for coronavirus, and even then the patients were not tested. The term used by JMA “不適切事例” literally translated means “inappropriate/unsuitable cases”.
The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seemed intent on keeping the official numbers of infected down and that means not only making the standards for getting a test very high (for example, you must have a fever of over 37.5 degrees Celsius for four days) but it also seems to be actively discouraging tests.
Why was Japan so gung-ho on not testing people? Mostly because Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and his work-spouse, the incredibly opportunistic Governor Yuriko Koike, had feverish Olympic dreams, and wanted Japan to appear safe in the hopes of keeping the Tokyo 2020 Olympics on track. As soon as the Olympics were postponed (within 24 hours) Koike made a huge show of appearing decisive, warned of a spike in coronavirus cases, and asked citizens to stay home on the weekend. She warned of a possible lockdown.
What an amazing coincidence! Everything was fine until the Olympics were postponed and suddenly Japan woke up to a hidden coronavirus epidemic. Imagine that!
Another reason that testing has lagged behind is that some in the the medical profession in Japan believe that testing for the virus is a waste of taxpayer money. The rationale is that since you can’t cure the virus itself, you’re better off treating the symptoms–aka 対症療法. Have a read of the Manual For Responding To Coronavirus Infections at Medical Institutions (医療機関における新型コロナウイルス感染症への対応ガイド) (March 10th Edition) from the Japanese Society for Infection Prevention and Control, for further insight.
The Japanese approach so far is not completely without merit. Japan has avoided a total lockdown and hospitals are not yet over capacity. The manual notes that Japan has essentially moved past the point where containment is possible and now is in a period of widespread infection. If you give up on the idea of containing the virus, then it does make sense to put priority on saving the lives of the small percentage of people who become seriously ill after being infected. Up to 80% of those infected barely become ill.
The German Embassy isn’t saying anything outrageous; it’s just the facts, Fraulein. More than likely once people notice, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will shake their heads, possibly complain and the wording will change.
You can change the wording but you can’t change the truth.
Japan, under the catastrophic leadership of Prime Minister Abe, has been keeping the numbers of the infected down by not testing widely for the disease. NHK, which has in part, become a channel of state propaganda, duly reports on new cases of infection by first mentioning cases in which the infected caught the virus overseas, playing into a mythos of the problem coming from outside Japan. Meanwhile, the majority of new infections come from within Japan.
The Japanese government bears a huge responsibility for the spread of the virus within the country. The February 19 decision to let infected Japanese passengers leave the Diamond Princess cruise ship and go home by public transport, effectively distributed the virus nationwide. Was anyone surprised that later those who went home, supposedly cleared of infection, later started getting ill?
The poor quarantine protocols on the ship also resulted in over ten Ministry Of Health, Labor and Welfare worker becoming infected with the coronavirus. They were all sent straight back to work. The Ministry of Health refused at first to even test the workers. Then grudgingly tested 41. Then all of them.
We can probably assume that the Ministry of Health itself, in charge of dealing with the coronavirus, is full of infected employees. We can assume but we can’t know because just like The US Embassy in Tokyo, the Ministry basically refuses (or refused to) test workers who had been exposed to the coronavirus. In fact, as a microcosm of the problem, this article published on March 4th, A U.S. Embassy Refused to Test Exposed Staff for Coronavirus (more or less) correctly predicted the chaos to come in the United States.
Many politicians in the Liberal Democratic Party of Japan, including Prime Minister Abe, early on in the crisis, actually welcomed the coronavirus. They felt it would give them the impetus to change the constitution. Maybe they really do have a master plan to fuck things up so badly that the only way out is to give them what they want.
The virus has just jumped from one ship, the Diamond Princess, to another larger ship, as it were, the island nation of Japan.
As you read this, we are on the verge of an epidemic here and headed toward disaster; figuratively speaking, the captain is asleep at the wheel. The sailors are inexperienced. The passengers are getting sick, and some have already died.
And the answer given by those running the show? They say what they need is more command and control, a better ability to lock things down, stronger laws to make people keep quiet.
They’ve already fixing their “great experiment” to show no matter how much they do wrong, they are always right.
Yesterday, the Mayor of our little City of Malden (Official) hosted a call-in show with the chief of police and Karen Colón Hayes. Almost every question in the tedious marathon concerned the caller’s safety or convenience. Almost none concerned volunteer service or preparation for what is to come. The Mayor concluded by saying that “we’ll all get through this.” I hope he understood that this was untrue, because it is very unlikely that all of us will.
Ask not what your city can do for you: ask what you can do for your city. I wish I knew better ways to help prepare for the coming storm.
There is a battle going on in the X-as-a-Service (XaaS) world that barely anybody is even aware of. That’s the battle to build the most comprehensive, most performant artificial intelligence and machine learning as a Service platform (AI/MLaaS). In this post, I will compare AWS, Azure, and GCP’s AI and ML platforms side by side. […]
It's always exciting to see a Datasette tutorial that wasn't written by me! This one is great - it shows how to load Central Park Squirrel Census data into a SQLite database, explore it with Datasette and then publish it to the Fly hosting platform using datasette-publish-fly and datasette-cluster-map.
Please tell us something about you and your professional background.
I am a bonsai teacher and nurseryman. After twenty years of growing bonsai as a hobby, I started working with trees full-time five years ago. Previous careers include nursery work and eight years in academic publishing.
You're a recognized bonsai expert and owner of the #1 bonsai blog in the U.S. How did you discover your passion, and what made you turn it into your profession?
Right after college I was working for the family business, a retail nursery, where I met a man who became a well-known bonsai teacher. We became great friends and I continued to learn from him for the next twenty years.
The gateway for making bonsai a career was my blog, Bonsai Tonight. I had no idea when I started writing about bonsai that it would become such a big part of my life, but it helped me develop an audience long before I thought about making it a career.
The exercise of producing blog articles gives shape to my week.
Which role does writing play in your life?
Writing has been a life-long love of mine. I currently write two articles per week for my blog. Most posts are how-to articles or reports from exhibits around the world, but the exercise of producing them gives shape to my week. To date, I’ve written over 1,000 posts.
I also write articles for various bonsai publications and chip away at longer works as I find time for it.
You've recently published The Little Book of Bonsai with Ten Speed Press. Please tell us more about it.
I wroteThe Little Book of Bonsai to help absolute beginners keep their trees healthy and to inspire them to learn more. The book guides readers through basic development techniques like pruning, wiring, and repotting with text and photos that show how to get started.
It's your first book. How difficult was it to write it?
Not surprisingly, it was a lot harder than I expected.
Finding time to focus on the book meant waking up at 5:30 and writing for a couple of hours before starting my normal workday. It was also tricky to provide simple advice to hobbyists who grow different species in different climates. Huge thanks go to my editor, Lisa Regul at Ten Speed Press, for helping me maintain clarity and focus from the first chapter through the last.
Writing the book was a lot harder than I expected.
Also, was it easy to find a publisher? Or did the publisher actually find you?
I was fortunate that the publisher contacted me about the project. The timing was great as I’d recently started work on a book for bonsai beginners.
Could you explain how you made use of Ulysses while writing the book? Which of its features helped you the most?
I wrote all notes and 100% of the first draft in Markdown with Ulysses. I have strong feelings about writing apps and have been a huge fan of the platform since I began using it several years ago.
The most helpful feature is the ability to create different “files” and search across all of them with a few keystrokes. I find using the mouse slow, and I don’t have to leave the keyboard very often when I’m in Ulysses.
How did you find out about Ulysses?
Every few years, I survey available editors and test them out. I’ve used more than I can count since I started working with PaperClip for my Atari 800XL back in the ’80s.
When I started taking notes for the book, I wanted a clean and friendly environment to work in. Once I started using Ulysses, there were no other choices.
I wanted a clean and friendly environment to work in. Once I started using Ulysses, there were no other choices.
What do you like best about Ulysses? Do you have a favorite feature?
My favorite feature is the ability to search across all of my work with ⌘O (command-O). Why can’t computers work that way for all of my files?
I can also say that it simply feels good to work in Ulysses. There are no distractions, I can sync text across all of my devices, and it’s comforting to know I have a place for everything I want to keep track of.
Which other tools and productivity apps are you using, and how do they help you?
As most of my writing involves photography, I lean heavily on Adobe Lightroom. In a typical year I publish 600-700 photos.
What else is essential to keep you productive? As an example, do you work in a particular environment or follow a timely routine?
My productivity is directly linked to how early I wake up. If I’m at my desk an hour or two before the sun comes up, I’ll be happy for the rest of the day knowing I got some good writing in.
For a regular dosis of sweet little trees, you can also follow Jonas on Instagram.
When I was writing my book on the 1975 EEC referendum, I was struck by how central debates about food supplies were. We barely mentioned the issue in 2016, because we've got used to the idea there will always be food on the shelves. That assumption needs to change. pic.twitter.com/0Ab50rMlPA
Similar to several other tech giants, the COVID-19 pandemic is having a significant effect on Apple’s plans to release its new iPhones in late 2020.
The company is currently considering delaying the release of the iPhone 12 “by months,” according to Japanese publication Nikkei, which spoke to sources that reportedly have knowledge of Apple’s plans.
Apple is concerned that -given the majority of its stores around the world are closed, its next flagship smartphone would not sell as well as expected. There are also reportedly concerns related to “practical hurdles” in Apple’s supply chain.
A final decision won’t be made until May, according to Nikkei‘s sources. The publication goes on to say the engineering development of the 2020 iPhone series has suffered because of travel restrictions around the world. Suppliers believe that due to where Apple currently is in the smartphone’s engineering process with its 2020 iPhones, a delay is looming.
Below is an excerpt from Nikkei’s report.
“We have been notified to start shipping in big volumes to meet Apple’s new product launch by the end of August, instead of like in previous years, when it would be sometime in June,” said a supplier of components related to printed circuit boards. “The change was made very recently, and that could imply that the mass production of the phone could also be delayed for months.”
That said, Bloomberg recently suggested Apple’s next iPhones are still on course for a fall launch. The report cited anonymous sources and stated Apple’s next flagship iPhones are “still on schedule to launch in the fall.”
Slack has revealed that it reached a new record for simultaneously connected users on its platform, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s no surprise that Slack reached new records, since there has been a surge in the number of people working remotely due to the virus.
On March 10th, Slack reported more than 10 million concurrent users, the number then jumped to 10.5 million on March 16th. On March 25th, the number reached 12.5 million users. It should be noted that Slack isn’t reporting total users counts, but is instead focusing on simultaneously connected users.
Slack recently launched a redesign that brought a number of new features including improved sidebar customization, a new universal compose button, a top navigation bar and more.
There’s also a new sidebar section for ‘People’ and ‘Mentions & reactions,’ which should make it easier for users to find people they want to DM and see mentions or channel notifications.
It’s likely that Slack will continue to see a surge in users, as more companies work from home amid the on-going pandemic.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has warned Canadians about a text scam amid the COVID-19 pandemic that poses as the federal government offering assistance.
“I’m sorry to say there appears to be a text scam going around on the new emergency response benefit. This is a scam,” Trudeau stated as he addressed the nation.
CP24 reporter Cristina Tenaglia posted a screenshot of one of the text scams on Twitter. The text claims that it is from the government and that the recipient can access a deposit as part of the ‘Canada relief fund.’
This comes after the government announced a new emergency benefit that would provide assistance to Canadians who have lost their income due to COVID-19. The benefit offers eligible Canadians $2,000 a month for up to four months.
It should be noted that the only possible way to receive this assistance will be through an online portal that the government is currently developing. Canadians will be able to apply for the benefit through the online portal.
“I want to remind everyone that the government’s website is the best place to find reliable information on everything we’re doing,” Trudeau noted.
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Agency has issued several warning about COVID-19 scams that are targeting Canadians through texts, phone calls, emails and over social media. It’s important to remain vigilant and only access credible sources and to beware of malicious links.
TekSavvy will reportedly lay off 130 employees and plans to raise its rates due to the increased costs related to COVID-19 and the ongoing internet service provider court challenge.
This news comes first from journalist Peter Nowak and we’ve also confirmed with TekSavvy that it will indeed let go of 130 employees, and the company will also be increasing its monthly rates by $5.
The aforementioned ISP court challenge is regarding the five major cable companies (Rogers, Shaw Communications, Eastlink, Cogeco, and Videotron), and Bell requests to the federal court challenge in November to overrule a 2019 regulatory decision that slashed wholesale rates that carriers can charge independent ISPs like TekSavvy.
Wholesale rates are paid by competitors, like TekSavvy and Distributel, which then get access to high-speed networks from incumbents like Bell, Rogers, and Telus. Rates are set so that incumbents can charge for this access after the CRTC reviews information regarding how much it costs to operate networks.
Following appeals filed by the larger carriers, the federal court suspended the CRTC’s wholesale rates decision. Since then, TekSavvy has repeatedly appealed to Canadian consumers for support in the battle with independent internet service providers versus the bigger telecoms.
Earlier this year, TekSavvy filed a complaint with the Competition Bureau that alleges that ISPs like Bell and Rogers engaged in anti-competitive practices like manipulating rates.
More recently, the carrier temporarily stopped accepting new customer orders due to COVID-19, as the company works to transition its call centre employees to work from home.
Update:03/26/2020: We’ve confirmed with TekSavvy that rates will increase by $5 and that 130 people were laid off. We’ll update this post with further details when they become available.
Now, the tech giant has confirmed that it will resume Chrome updates under an adjusted schedule.
On its blog, Google stated that M83 will be released three weeks earlier than previously planned and include all M82 work, given that Chrome 82 was skipped entirely.
Elsewhere, Canary, Dev and Beta channels are resuming this week, with M83 moving to Dev, and M81 continuing in Beta. Meanwhile, Stable channel will resume release next week with security and critical fixes in M80, followed by M81 during the week of April 7th and M83 around mid-May.
Finally, Google says it will provide an update in the future on the timing of the M84 branch and releases.
A full schedule breakdown, which Google says it will update regularly, can be found here.
14 days later!
Stephanie Booth
their data collection methods. Their presentation to the parliament on 25 March shows three sources of data (slide 2):
The last measurement comes from a monitoring system of NIVEL, national institute for health services research (for those reading in Dutch Ton has links to explore). It includes data from around 40 of GP practices and tests for various infections from a smaller selection of testing facilities (more details in Dutch, report for week 12). The following is relevant for us here:
Statistics like that might be good enough to monitor the overall health situation in the country, but they are not giving a representative picture of how an epidemic is developing. That is especially true early in the process when cases are unevenly distributed and the numbers are too low to detect by sampling. Emergent clusters of infection are easy to miss if they happen at the location where data is not collected (how knew that testing in Brabant and not along A1 is needed?).
In essence, this is a way to slow down the spread of infection without broad testing and tracing of actual cases and without total lock-down. This scenario relies on visible flu symptoms and on citizens following the advice to quarantine the whole family as long as one of the members has those symptoms.
When those human qualities are part of policies and actions at the state level lack of transparency prevents scrutiny by external peers or concerned public and it costs lives – not only of the patients that do not get help because it was not predicted reliably by a model, but also those of doctors who get infected by an untested asymptomatic carrier or collapse under the pressure of choosing which lives are worth saving.
The key objective: increase resilience. To paraphrase Vietnam POW James Stockdale: Resilience means striking a balance between facing the “brutal truth” of how bad things can get, while also retaining confidence that you will survive to see the other side. Companies need to build the necessary agility to get through tough near-term conditions, while keeping an eye on the horizon to build perspective on what will matter as the crisis ebbs.
Many companies will see a huge drop in revenues in the near term. What can you do to shore up your revenue structure? If you are one of the lucky few to have a crisis-driven demand spike, capture it quickly — you will need every dollar you earn now to cushion you as recession sets in, and consumer spending drops. Some key steps: Ensure continuity of existing business where possible. Reallocate resources so that your best talent is focused on the highest priorities. Pivot offerings to make these more relevant. Rethink your go-to-market approaches, by refocusing routes to market, redirecting your sales pipeline, and honing marketing messages.
is the Managing Partner of Innosight. He previously was a Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.
Elizabeth Stephenson most recently served as the President of The FIJI Water Group and POM Wonderful. She previously was a partner at McKinsey & Company.
Ulysses Blog.
redhistorian on Twitter.
