Side Slacks

👋 Hey, Must Readers!  I trust you had a good week.

This week’s Must Reads Newsletter has 11 must-read stories & a microblog about Slack’s growing influence on businesses, for the good, bad and the ugly 😬.

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Must Read Articles Of The Week

1. Are You Too Far Removed? 👁 One of the core issues we have in business is the more senior we become the more removed we become from our discipline, the question then becomes is it impacting your work, your team and business? - Find out if you are too far removed

2. Chatty Supermarket Checkout 💬 I like this idea, a Dutch supermarket is introducing a chatty checkout to help those who are lonely and feeling the impact of lockdowns (quarantines). Smart idea for retention and loyalty - Read the full article > Related Read: My take on how everything has to become an experience

3. How Far Away From Problem Solving Is Your Business? 🧑‍💼 Business success is usually answering customers desires or problems, here is what most companies get wrong, they stop answering customer problems and start causing themselves issues - Read the full article

4. The Three Phases Of Business 👩‍💼 Why some of your colleagues loved what the company used to be, why so many hate what it is today and why the future might be missold - Read the full article

5. Scamming The Scammers 🐍 After living a professional career where I wear a grey hat and thinking differently has been successful, I love seeing people thinking of ways to take matters into their own hands and uncover scammers by… scamming them - Read the full article

6. The Robot Citizen That Wants To Be A Mother 🤖 Yes, they are coming for our jobs 😏 and now they want baby robots…the first robot citizen is broody and wants a baby. This isn’t the start of terminator but it might just be more biased appearing - Read the full article

7. Urgency Bias - Why We Chase Short Term Deadlines & Goals 🥅 We are wired in weird ways as humans, we have so many biases we are unaware of, urgency bias is one of them and is finally we are starting to understand why we act ‘the why’ we do and how we can stop urgency becoming an issue - Read the full article

8. Creators The 1%-ers 💰 People believe influencers and creators make huge amounts of money, that’s actually incorrect as per this report —Top 1% of Twitch streamers earn 50%+ all revenue —Top 1% podcasters earn almost all ad revenue —Top 10 Substacks make $20M. Tipping has become an option but will it work? - Read the full breakdown> FWIW I am thankful for all of the must readers who tipped aka brought me a coffee to say thanks!

9. Old School Meets New School Cool 👟 Harrods is world-renowned but their relevancy in this modern landscape comes into question, so what’s the next move? Go deep into Sneakers and limited edition sneakers only. Smart move for revenue, we will see if it helps with relevancy - Read the full article

1. Merch Melee t-shirt👚 Merch has been a staple for many business models, it’s complicated and requires serious marketing spends but the likes of Disney is the key successful example. Now Amazon and Walmart (+ many local versions outside of the 🇺🇸) are battling it out to be the hub for popular shows merch hub. Netflix has their own store (on the simple domain of netflix.shop) but understands they need marketplaces, big & seeded budgets and big-box stores to sell their physical products. - Read the full article 

2. Two TikTok’s 💃 As Tiktok is always popular on must reads, here are two videos you will want to watch. (1) 🔥Burnout Symptoms

(2)📱Size Does Matter

— Career Advice Corner —

This week’s anonymous career advice is how to connect with a disconnected management team. Submit your own anonymous question here

🎧 The Future State Of Podcast - Pitch Edition 🎧

📧 Email Needs Upgrading! 📧 Email has rarely had an upgrade since its introduction in business 30+ years ago. Gmail & Outlook are average at best and that’s because no one wants to challenge MSN and Google. I have come up with a brand new client (in the idea phase) that will make email a work operating system and actually be useful and collaborative and kill the 30+ apps we use just then to attach on an email (listen to the full pitch)

Microblog: 💬 Slack Attack - Why the chat-ification of work is now being reported 💬

Story to read: Apple’s culture has notoriously been secret, not just because of the product development but due to the size of the brand and the way they have conducted themselves. In recent interviews and leaks inside of Apple looks pretty bad (or normal to anyone who’s worked in a large listed company) and it’s all come to light with the introduction of a company-wide chat tool, in Apple’s case it was slack.

Any chat-based tool moves work from email to mass chat, the chat-ification of work has to be given guidelines, agreed working principles and enable colleagues to succeed. One of the big issues with slack and teams is there are rarely guidelines to help teams become successful and then a huge misalignment happens. When chat becomes the default Comms channel it drives more chatter, more questions and typically less action and becomes more social network than work network tool.

I’ve referred to these types of tools as surfacing the unknown known’s, it becomes a breeding ground for gossip (work misinformation) and when there isn’t clarity or enough transparency we will as humans have done for millions of years to survive, we flock to those we feel safe with and form discussions and look for others going through similar experiences and gossip happens. What is interesting is people create their own side slacks, group chats on WhatsApp and iMessage and then all corporate eyes cannot see the conversation. If you run a business you’ve likely experienced a few negative experiences with chat and if you haven’t they will come. Be wary: When slack (team etc) works well it can really bring work alive, otherwise it will bring issues.

Thanks for reading today.

If you like to discuss any articles, have questions or an article recommendation, I’m always free for Must Readers - just hit reply.

Until next week’s Must Reads, go well.

Danny Denhard