No Mercy No Malice

Why Apple and Peloton Are Dominating the Attention Economy

And why Pinterest and Snapchat are leaving money on the table

“The task is… not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.”

― Erwin Schrödinger

Just as life is not about what happens to you, but about how you respond to what happens to you, insight is not a function of data, but of how you perceive the data. Plotting data in different ways is illuminating, even fun, and it can lead one to discover stories. And while “stories” often connotes fiction, stories can also be true, and can even create truth.

The best way to predict the future is to make it. And, just as history is the stories we (that is, the victors) tell ourselves, stories can shape the future by giving people a path, an inspiration, or a goal. One inspiration for those stories is data… and different ways of looking at the data.

Just read the last paragraph and it’s clear I’m insecure re my intellect, or have an edible hangover. The answer is yes.

Anyway, I love 2x2 matrices, and how their quadrants inspire stories. Identifying two factors that define four groups can provide insight into…