Two Nice Reads on Management, and Rational Danger Taking
Two nice reads I needed to share with you — one is about management, the opposite is about danger.
Interview with Barry McCarthy by NYTimes DealBook
This was some of the candid interviews by an incoming CEO in a turnaround scenario that I’ve ever seen!
A number of analysts have stated that everybody who desires a Peloton already purchased one. How large is the TAM, or the whole addressable market?
You may’t probably know what the TAM is. You’re in the course of inventing the TAM.
On founders and imaginative and prescient, and the challenges of actuality
What have you ever realized from the opposite founders you’ve labored with?
They see issues the remainder of us don’t see, which is why they get to be founders.
What went flawed right here?
They acquired caught up within the imaginative and prescient factor on the expense of getting actual and coping with the world as it’s. I imply, actually, who thought that Covid was going to be the ceaselessly factor?
On his relationship with John Foley [Peloton cofounder, Board member and original CEO
How hard will it be leading the company when John and other insiders still have a controlling stake and veto right? You still work for him.
The question is: What best serves his economic interest? At the end of the day, he’s very much an economic animal. And so, if we’re winning in the marketplace with my leadership, I think this is a nonissue. He’s a happy camper. He’s doing what he likes doing. Which is not everything else that I’m doing — and he gets to be the product visionary, right?
And if the company isn’t doing well, I’m getting replaced anyway. So it’s pretty cut and dry. And if I don’t do well — and there’s a change — maybe at that point the business gets sold.
Steven Johnson on the ‘micromort,’ an attempt to standardize the expression of fatality risk for a given cause of death.
Sometimes I feel as if we’re increasingly uncomfortable with the idea that there’s always going to be some risk in our lives, and especially some degree of unknown risks in the earliest waves of innovation. I understand that part of this ‘risk backlash’ is that in many historical cases the risks have been disproportionately born by those with the least power in America.
Johnson’s post introduced me to a concept created by a Stanford engineering professor in the 1980s: the micromort. A micromort represents a one-in-a-million chance of death. And here’s an example of how it’s applied in context [via Wikipedia]:
The rational quant aspect of me does love turning perceived danger into clear comparisons of mortality. It’s a blunt instrument and I’m certain not with out its personal skeptics, however was a learn I like to recommend.
