Derek Thompson’s writing is always enjoyable.1 In his Hit Makers, Thompson looks at two main questions: 1. What is the secret to making products that people like? 2. Why do some products fail in the marketplaces while similar ideas catch on and become massive hits? To address the first one, he shows that many of the viral hits have some strong shared features (timely exposure, MAYA rule2– most advanced yet acceptable designs, refrain and repetition for music, helpful economics, network effects, and the force of storytelling). But these features are, as Thompson himself argues, not exactly some “secret sauce”. I hope that the readers are not frustrated by the eventual answer to Why question: much of virality is due to…
Leave a CommentPoiesis Posts
As 2017 has concluded, time to take stock. Here is the list of most read posts on the OWL Blog. 2017 Book Recommendations Books read in 2017 Where have all the Retail jobs gone? Death by a Single Cut? Roaming Workforce: A Review of Nomadland Dynamic Pricing of Parking Spots This is just from raw data – I am omitting recency bias, about page, etc.
Leave a CommentIn late December 2017, continuing its string of legal setbacks, Uber lost a case in the European Court of Justice which ruled that Uber is a taxi company. Specifically, the courts rule that a company whose service is “to connect, by means of a smartphone application and for remuneration, non-professional drivers using their own vehicle with persons who wish to make urban journeys” must be considered “a service in the field of transport.” The news coverage of the case indicate that the ruling only impacts four markets (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania), where Uber is yet to be regulated under the local or national laws. In fact, Uber is already regulated like a taxi company in many European nations. Proponents of…
Leave a CommentHighlighting five books that I loved reading in 2017. These are not necessarily books that were published in 2017. By design, and by inhibitions imposed by the relative paucity of my prior readings, I tend to read books after a time lag. On the flip side, I would like to think that my reading is not strongly influenced by the news cycle. The time lag also provides opportunities to discover older, well-regarded books. In the recommendation below, I did not include books I read again (e.g. Tolkien and Marcus Aurelius) and also some books that I thoroughly enjoyed (e.g., a new translation of Crime and Punishment by Pevear and Volokhonsky). More or less, I have tried to curate books based…
Leave a CommentHere are some curated recommendations for your holiday watching/reading/listening. I limit my consumption of media (not books). So, like all lists, this one is also highly subjective. (I have no financial interest in recommending these). Movies Kubo and the two strings. Animated movie (from Laika studios) with a layered and complex narrative. Great for families with kids interested in slightly mature themes (similar to Miyazaki movies). Features a beautiful cover of While My Guitar Gently Weeps by Regina Spektor. On NetFlix. Contratiempo. (The Invisible Guest). Spanish Crime Thriller and morality play. On NetFlix. Get Out. A brilliant genre-bending film, with the audacity of vision, and taut storytelling. What a directorial debut. Wonder woman. All praise well-deserved. A blockbuster movie that…
Leave a Comment
The Containers Podcast mini-series (with eight self-contained 30-minute episodes) by Alexis Madrigal at Atlantic is amazing! As an Operations academic in a business school, I am a fan of both nitty-gritty details and narrative story-telling canvas. When I came across the Containers podcast my stoicism vanished, and I was giddy with excitement. Containers are one of those mundane things that fundamentally changed global trade and turned supply chains into complex organisms. You would be completely mistaken to think that a podcast on containers would be boring. Alexis Madrigal brilliantly weaves logistics facts with human interest stories that form the cogs in gigantic machinery of global trade. He talks about the history of Oakland, the “deaths” of longshoremen, poetry, Filipino lives, logistics,…
Leave a Comment
An Amazon worker at Chattanooga, Tenn., fulfillment center in August. Photo Credit: Doug Strickland/Associated Press A fascinating article by Laura Stevens on WSJ (Subscription required) talks about how Amazon sets its third-party “deal of the day”. The first compelling fact that stood out from the article was the scale of revenues generated by third-party sellers on Amazon. A graph of the total gross merchandise volume (GMV) sold by Amazon, shows that in the recent years, the third-party share of Amazon revenues have increased from 50% to about 70% (even as Amazon’s revenues have exploded). How are these deals evaluated and picked by Amazon? Amazon’s deal of the day selections hinge on two important factors—whether it thinks an item will be…
Leave a Comment