WEW19 - How All Work Will Become Gig Work

Since starting to write regularly, I’ve been most surprised with how much there is to cover. Each week I write two to three blog posts and this newsletter, hitting on five to seven topics every week. It’s never a scramble to find content, the work is in picking what to write about. As always I’ve selected what I believe will most benefit you as a leader and a human.

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In this week’s Email:

✧ Marketing - Twitter’s “For You” algorithm is now open source.
✧ Future of Work - The Gig Economy is now the only economy
✧ Artificial Intelligence - AI is your new personal trainer and coach
✧ Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week

❖ Talent Management - What’s a bridge role, and should you worry about hiring people looking for one?
❖ Worksheets - Premium worksheets to help you and your team slay
❖ Blogposts - Access to full-length blog posts without the paywall

Marketing

Twitter’s “For You” algorithm is now open source.

If you have been following the Twitter saga, most of the internet isn’t very happy with how the platform has been evolving. The most recent upset has been defaulting the user’s feed to “For You.” This is a departure from the usual experience of showing tweets by who you follow and instead is a feed Twitter has curated for you. This means random people showing up and you not knowing why.

While this is a poor experience for users, it’s a great opportunity for brands, as it gives you a way to break out of your current followers into the feeds of new people. What is amazing though is that Twitter open-sourced the code for the “For You” algorithm giving us access to optimize marketing and content for the system.

Aakash Gupta gives a great breakdown on Twitter, but the TL DR. Don’t link outside of Twitter, stick to your niche, and get engagement.

Future of Work

How the gig economy is spreading to thought workers.

The gig economy isn’t new. We have had ride-hailing services, Task Rabbit, and other comparable job-creation apps in the wild for a while. But all of these have focused on unskilled or semi-skilled labor.

Since October, we have seen massive layoffs in tech, and hiring freezes at companies that usually hire with wild abandon, and a flood in the job market of talented folks looking for work. Right before that, we saw the “great resignation” occur with many young workers leaving companies post-pandemic. What I’ve seen is an uptick in consulting (me included), as the nature of work and thought work changes.

As jobs previously focused on thought and creativity are lost to advances in technology, individuals will still need to earn their livelihood. While tools like Upwork already provide this to an extent, I would anticipate similar sites focused on highly skilled thought labor to soon emerge.

Artificial Intelligence

I’ve gained 15 pounds of muscle with ChatGPT.

Human improvement is one of the key themes of this newsletter. It spans how we work and work with others, but it also extends to the future of the human body. Health and Fitness.

If you have been following along on my Instagram you may have noticed that I’ve gotten, well, huge. But it’s not the regular “diet and exercise” routine that’s led to this. It’s Diet, Exercise, and AI. Every day, my warmup, workout, and stretches are planned by ChatGPT to be what’s best for me given target areas, goals, and recent workouts. It takes into account the specific equipment I have at home too.

Personal trainers and gym memberships are very expensive, let alone a nutritionist. For yourself, but also for the market as wellness comes into focus, AI will dominate the workout, diet, and mental health space with custom plans and daily suggestions fit for each individual. It’s already working for me.

Further Reading

Books

The Lean Startup - It’s funny how a book so essential to leading in product or tech can become so unneeded. I just (re)read The Lean Startup and it was great to get the refresher on the origin of much of how we work in modern software product cycles. The most striking part was as I was talking to people in my network while reading it, asking them if they themselves read it. The most common answer was “no.” This was a “no” despite the fact that many of these people live by the principles in this book. In 2023 Lean Startup methodology is de-facto, you are using it even if you don’t realize it. This can be a problem, as it always is with “just following along.” While you may not learn anything new when reading this, you may learn why everyone does what they do from the source, which could give you a chance to change and improve how you and those around you work.

Blogs

• How To Build A Culture of Value Creation

• How To Value R&D for Emerging Tech Adoption

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