1. How technology disrupted the truth … and can bring it back (Katharine Viner, The Guardian)
2. Facebook says Facebook’s lack of diversity isn’t Facebook’s fault (Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal)
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As part of the NewCo Shift Dialogs, I had a chance to interview Brad Smith of Microsoft. You can watch the video here, but because we had to cut it down for time, many fascinating portions of the conversation did not make it into the video. Below is the full transcript, with light editing for clarity.
As president you don’t have product responsibility, but you have a lot of corporate responsibility. It seems to me that you’re responsible for the kind of company that Microsoft is going to be, what it wants to be in the world. You have to understand input from the outside, listen to the needs of the inside, and bring the two together.
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After my last post on how you can blame Silicon Valley for Donald Trump, I got a lot of questions as to why productivity is stagnating. Stagnating productivity leads to people being angry with their economic well being and turning to easy sounding solutions spouted by Mr Trump. Silicon Valley is the self proclaimed world capital of innovation, but as of yet none of the Bay Area break throughs is accelerating the sluggish productivity growth.
But why? How is it possible that giving everybody in the world access to all the information in the world doesn’t show up in economic statistics? Here are five theories.
A mission-driven company names a goal and says, “This is why we’re here.” Sure, profit is great, and profit powers a mission, but it’s not the point.
This simple principle puts the whole mission-driven movement on a potential collision course with the most deeply held and widely shared assumptions that have driven the global economy for the last quarter century. Today, neoliberalism — the school of economic thought that promotes market competition and small government — is facing challenges on multiple fronts: Its gospel of austerity hasn’t restored the economies that bought into it. Even the International Monetary Fund’s own researchers are questioning its premises. Popular movements on both right and left are threatening to blow up long-negotiated free-trade pacts. And a lot of the rest of us are hoping to get something more fulfilling out of our work than an “I made more money than you” certificate.
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In his new book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, noted media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff takes on the failure of the digital economy to make things better for more people. At the core of Rushkoff’s critique is what he calls the “obsolete economic operating system that emphasizes growth” and the abandonment of core values that occur once companies go public and succumb to short-term thinking.
Rushkoff suggests a shift away from the growth pressures of publicly traded markets and platform monopolies — and toward collaborative models that build on the contributions and add to the wealth of their workers, communities, and consumers.
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