4th QUARTER THOUGHTS

“It is a relentless, relentless competitiveness to do whatever you have to do to win. You have to develop this mentality. This is who you guys are. This will forever be who the Miami Heat is. There will always be motherf------ in this Miami Heat jersey.”

leaders of successful teams have to enable their organization to move rapidly, which means empowering people at all levels to make decisions. Speed is a huge asset in confrontations in both business and war, particularly when there is a substantial size difference between two competitors

I learned that the No. 1 thing you need to do as an organization is develop talent, and allow that talent—be it in the office or on the court—to understand that there’s a purpose, and that what they do matters and counts, that there’s going to be meaningful advancement somewhere along the way -- Pat Riley

Undoubtedly, both buildings will bring a degree of architectural excitement to Silicon Valley that it has never seen before. But the real question is whether, for all their ambition, they will do much to change the underlying suburban culture. They are both big, private, sealed-off corporate villas that most people will reach by car. At a time when the city, not the suburb, seems to hold the allure for younger workers in the technology industry, how much will Foster’s refined, iPhone-like architecture or Gehry’s lively, garden-topped workspace matter? Twitter’s renovated office space in an old San Francisco neighborhood may, in the end, be the real harbinger of the future.

All companies that grow really big do so in only one way: people recommend the product or service to other people. What this means is that if you want to be a great company some day, you have to eventually build something so good that people will recommend it to their friends--in fact, so good that they want to be the first one to recommend it to their friends for the implied good taste. No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product.

Art is the question to a problem in the world. Design is the answer

If the Raptors were to tank ...

All the chatter and pontification in the world does not change some hard facts. Snapchat and other big, growing mobile messaging platforms such as, but not limited to, Line, WeChat, Whatsapp, Kik, and others are all in the middle of a high-stakes, lucrative mobile land grab. Regardless of “how” these new networks grew to such large scale, the fact remains mobile growth only continues to march on, unbundling and fracturing the concentrated graph Facebook has collected on the web. It’s not hard to imagine a future where mobile messaging apps become the predominant platform for new mobile products and services, distribution and commerce. In the eye of the storm, it’s nearly impossible to model what these apps are worth on paper — that can only be determined by the market, and in the case of Snapchat, if the reports are true, it is worth somewhere between $3-4Bn.

We thought we were the best in Hamburg and Liverpool—it was just a matter of time before everybody else caught on. We were the best fucking group in the goddamn world … and believing that is what made us what we were.

The great thing about designers and engineers working in proximity is that they can keep each other motivated and productive. Engineers are galvanized by the images and ideas the designers churn out, and the designers are re-inspired when they see their creations come to life. “You want designers and engineers to really value working shoulder to shoulder,” Jackson says. “Both groups are motivated by the high-level goals of a new product or feature. You want them to iterate on designs until they manifest those goals.”