11 May 2020
This week's additions focus on leadership, founder stories, and mindset, with new digests from Bill Gallagher, Masters of Scale, and Founders. Highlights include Your crisis behavior is leadership judgment day — act accordingly Verizon retrained 20,000 employees and moved 115,000 remote in two weeks.
Showing 10 digests for 11 May 2020.
Crisis leadership: why people matter most in a downturn
Bill Gallagher
May 17, 2020
Management
9
Culture building
7
Communication
6
Your crisis behavior is leadership judgment day — act accordingly
MBWA still works remotely: call people, ask about their lives
Tiny courtesies and genuine listening outlast any clever strategy
How Verizon's CEO led through COVID-19 without a playbook
Masters of Scale
May 16, 2020
Management
9
Business operating systems
6
Verizon retrained 20,000 employees and moved 115,000 remote in two weeks.
Disconnecting customers during a crisis costs far more than lost revenue.
COVID permanently broke barriers to telemedicine and remote education.
Resilience & grit
Podcast
Charles Kettering: The professional amateur inventor
Founders
May 15, 2020
Resilience & grit
9
Identity & self-belief
7
Case studies
6
Progress comes from unusual people with imagination and willingness to work independently and courageously.
Treat yourself as a professional amateur: embrace learning through trial and error and repeated failure.
The unknown unknowns far outweigh what we know; approach all work with humble curiosity.
Productivity & habits
YouTube
Energy management, the three selves, and the work-rest ratio
Noah Kagan
May 14, 2020
Productivity & habits
9
Resilience & grit
6
Recovery isn't the opposite of performance — it's the mechanism
Any strength overused becomes a liability; find its positive opposite
Under pressure, a survival self hijacks decisions — quieting the body restores the adult
The three-step conversion copywriting process for beginners
Joanna Wiebe
May 14, 2020
Copywriting
9
Customer discovery
6
Research is the biggest phase — skipping it guarantees weak copy
Split your screen: paste real prospect language directly onto the page
A/B testing isn't always possible; five-second tests catch clarity failures fast
Resilience & grit
YouTube
Managing stress and emotional blocks for entrepreneurs in crisis
Bill Gallagher
May 13, 2020
Resilience & grit
9
Communication
6
Your crisis reaction is likely an old childhood trauma, not the current event.
Avoiding emotional discomfort costs businesses months and millions in delayed decisions.
A three-step process to name, story-test, and root-trace any emotional block.
Intel's transformation from memory to microprocessors
Acquired
May 12, 2020
Origin stories
9
Pivoting
9
Management
5
Memory business commoditized overnight; Andy Grove pivoted Intel to CPUs and sole-sourced the 386
Japanese competitors undercut Intel 10% recursively; market share fell from 80% to 1.3% in four years
Sole-source 386 processor created monopoly; Intel Inside campaign locked out AMD for six years
How Angela Ahrendts united global teams at Burberry and Apple
Masters of Scale
May 12, 2020
Culture building
9
Communication
7
Founder interviews
6
A logo alone won't align a team — mission and human contact will.
Confronting resistant executives directly unlocked Burberry's double-digit growth.
An unedited iPhone video beat 70,000-person email for building trust.
How Gumroad cut costs, went remote, and grew to $700k MRR
Noah Kagan
May 12, 2020
Case studies
10
Processes & SOPs
7
Cash flow management
6
Burning $300k/month with staff and offices taught the wrong lessons
Profitability came from removing things, not adding them
Two metrics — creator volume and MRR — are all that matter
Productivity & habits
YouTube
How to protect your time from fake business gurus on YouTube
Noah Kagan
May 11, 2020
Productivity & habits
8
Identity & self-belief
5
Most business YouTubers profit by selling to you, not from real businesses.
Three red-flag phrases that expose a fraudster immediately.
Zig when others zag — read books no one else is reading.