Well... huh. I had some thoughts. Feel free to discuss. Or not.
* Interesting choice to analyze the civil rights movement of the 60s vs Black Lives Matter from an organizational standpoint.
I guess that's keeping things "current", but I feel like it's possibly trivializing the gravity of what those movements we're and are about.
* A winning soccer team can be made up of many weak links (although I feel that's a little judgey. How about *normal* links) vs a winning basketball team that only needs 3 strong links and one lumbering white Australian. (I was wishing he actually knew enough about Atlassian to make that an inside joke.)
Enh. Sportsball analogies. But yeah, I guess the point being that you don't need superstars, just really good cooperation between a distributed network.
* A union for the New Yorker magazine making a demand that fact checkers and web producers get a 1-year sabbatical after 2-years of work. And out of hand he dismisses that idea as "absurd".
(Noting that Gladwell is a staff writer for the New Yorker.)
Hey yeah, that sounds like it'd be a pretty sweet perk. But maybe, just maybe it's a negotiating tactic to ask for more than you actually think you'll get. Especially when it's a fact that the publishing industry relies heavily on the idea of unpaid or severely underpaid labor (internships). Add to that the fact that the most of the people who can "afford" to work for free or cheap will come from systemically privileged backgrounds, and so then, the publishing industry continues to be extremely limited in the kinds of people that are writing, editing, and most importantly gate-keeping what people read.
But yeah, I get it, his point was that "kids today" don't want to work in a top-down hierarchical orgs, and it's all about distributed power.
HENCE you need a tools like Atlassian makes! Brilliant!
(But yeah, I actually enjoyed the talk. Much preferred it to a standard "Here's how to 10X your business" kind of thing.)
