Michael Liedtke’s Netflix nights still come wrapped in red-and-white envelopes is a lovely post about the people who still get DVDs delivered via Netflix:

“When you open your mailbox, it’s still something you actually want instead of just bills,” said Konkle, a resident of Savannah, Georgia, who has been subscribing to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service since 2005.

But the end of an amazing era is upon us:

When—not if—it happens, Netflix will shut down a service that has shipped more than 5 billion discs across the U.S. since its inception nearly a quarter century ago. And it will echo the downfall of the thousands of Blockbuster video rental stores that closed because they couldn’t counter the threat posed by Netflix’s DVD-by-mail alternative.

Pour one out for one of the few business that can truly call themselves “disruptive”. And kind of related… Here’s Andrew A. Rosen in The Question Plaguing Connected TV: Who’s Watching?:

About 17% of advertisements shown on televisions connected through a streaming device—including streaming boxes, sticks and gaming consoles—play while the TV is turned off.

Turns out lots of people turn off their TVs but not their streaming devices, so the thing just keeps playing to no one. Oops.

Here’s a good analogy from Josephine Conneely to help figure out why growth might be stalling:

Imagine each of the 3 criteria pillars, Product, GTM and Org, as legs of a stool. Ideally each leg is of even height. This allows it to sturdily hold whatever is needed (in this case it’s increasing user volumes). Each leg can continue to grow (perhaps this is some sort of stool tree), and as long as the legs grow in tandem the success metrics of choice are safe. However, there may at times be an imbalance. Imagine an organisation with a great sales and marketing team who have created such demand that the product is struggling with performance issues as it scales to meet increased usage volumes. This leads to a lopsided stool, which while functioning, is not operating in manner which enables the org to capitalise on growth potential. If the product issues are not rectified, this could result in churn, reputational damage and a negative growth trajectory. Imbalance leads to lost opportunities.

Read the whole article for an illustration of the concept, and also how to use the framework in practice.

I never thought that I’d want to read a book about a guy who watched Predator 146 times. But Shooting at Nothing: An Interview with Ander Monson convinced me otherwise:

In following every rabbit hole of his obsession with the film through to its end, Monson creates a book that is truly one-of-a-kind—not just a dose of nostalgia for movie buffs, but a revelatory investigation for anyone who’s ever really loved a singular piece of culture, enough that it got tangled inextricably in their identity and could never quite be excised. In Monson’s own words: “I believe that if you look long and hard enough at what you loved best at fourteen and how you lived then and what you saw in the world, it will reveal both the world and you.” As the pages turn, a question inevitably arises: What have you loved in the way that Monson loves Predator? And, for better or worse, how has it made you who you are?

In Official myths Mandy Brown talks about how we are trying to solve the legitimate challenges of remote work by blindly (and incorrectly) assuming that the solution is going back to the office:

In many a remote-critical piece I’ve read, there’s a kind of mythical office that remote culture is being compared to, a place where everyone is welcomed, where collaboration and support is easy-going and automatic, where everyone is always whiteboarding or talking in the hallways. It’s kind of astonishing to see how much this presumed office utopia has become implicit, given we have literal decades of satire about offices as locales of poorly lit, soul-sucking, isolated work, where you are more likely to be abused by your boss than sponsored by them.

She goes on to explain the importance of supporting junior staff, and how office environments are often not ideal environments for that.

Tim Casasola’s post Create awareness of reality through bottom-up strategy points to an issue that we often see in teams—the work that they are doing is disconnected from the company’s core strategy:

There is often a difference between what an organization says its strategy is and what customer/project teams do on a day-to-day. When this dissonance is present, customer/project teams share with the org that their reality isn’t aligned with the organization’s vision. “It’s great that we want to pursue this new customer segment, but most of our engineers are focused on improving the experience of our current customer segment… and we’re far from where we want to be there.”

And yet, the org still says they have a “strategy.” The org turns a blind eye when customer/project teams describe their reality and relies on its existing narrative when feeling challenged.

The organization needs to be aware of when this dissonance takes place. So that they can learn from it, and come up with an actionable strategy.

Tim points to John Cutler’s “Bet Up” activity as a useful exercise to make this disconnect clear:

This seems like a really useful exercise for teams to undertake. It might also be really interesting to ask the executive team to fill out row 4 of the above, and see how their answers differ from what the teams come up with. Exposing a big strategy mismatch in such a clear way could be a really powerful tool to move the organization in a direction where a team’s day-to-day work is reflected in the overall product strategy.

Ben Casnocha has a long, excellent piece entitled 10,000 Hours with Reid Hoffman: What I Learned, in which he shares a bunch of lessons he learned from then LinkedIn founder:

A lot of strategists (and CEOs) think that their job is to conceive a strategy and then hand it off to the underlings to execute. They might concede that delegation matters, but usually as a matter of execution more than strategy.

Reid disagrees. He once told me, “Whoever is actually immersed in the actual execution of a strategy should always think of ways to tweak the strategy for the better.” It’s a litmus test for talent: How do you know if you have A-players on your project team? You know it if they don’t just accept the strategy you hand them. They should suggest modifications to the plan based on their closeness to the details. And as they execute, they should continue to tweak the strategy, and you (the owner) should not feel a need to micromanage or second guess—if you do, you’ve got the wrong person.

The whole piece is full of wonderful gems like that. Highly recommended read.