unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc

Major layoffs, fake news and misinformation, as well as social media wars against the media & journalists have been hot topics in the last few years when it comes to what we consider “news,” especially in the United States. Will Slauter consider the problems of our modern day news production, by taking a look at the past, and the history of news media that brought us to this place. Will is a professor of history and American studies at Sorbonne Université in Paris. His research interests include the history of publishing, the history of news and journalism, and the history of copyright law in the United States and the United Kingdom. He also wrote the book “Who Owns the News?: A History of Copyright.”This episode covers a wide range of issues from the history of news including: The origins of content curation, The AP vs. INS - a critical legal case on intellectual property, and the role of the post office in disseminating information.Episode Quotes:AP vs. INS legal case:The legal principle that we're talking about is this idea of a quasi property. The court said well, any newspaper reader or anybody out there, as soon as they learn the news would be free to repeat it, would be free to discuss it and so on. But it's not right for direct competitors, another press agency, and newspapers that own presses to free ride on the labor of the Associated Press. And so what they got was this misappropriation that basically says for as long as the news has commercial value no direct competitors may republish it.Facebook algorithms and news curation:When it's done by an algorithm, it raises all sorts of other questions. And there's the algorithm - we know it is very personalized and is trying to elicit certain kinds of responses from us and to target advertising that will go along with it and so on. And so I think actually that makes it all the more valuable to look at the history of compilation, look at the history of news aggregation as something that goes back. And think about what is lost when you lose that human element. Thoughts on when the postal services subsidized newspapers:You can see that this is an early republic. They're all very aware of the fact that this [the United States] is a vast territory, that there are going to be regional differences. There already are with questions like slavery. And that in order for democracy to function on such a wide geographic scale, the post office is going to be crucial and it's by ascending newspapers through the mail that we could have the possibility of facilitating the circulation of information.Looking back at the Fairness Doctrine:And people in recent years have often looked back with perhaps a bit too much nostalgia at the Fairness Doctrine. At least in principle it seems like something that we could use now. Some people have said, well it didn't actually always work out that well, it didn't always really lead to both sides given equal treatment.But on the other hand, it was a principle and it was something that was there and it was attached to the license. It was something that was potentially where the state could intervene. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Sorbonne Université Will Slauter on TwitterWill Slauter on Books and IdeasHis work:Will Slauter’s Published ArticlesWho Owns the News?: A History of Copyright Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Making strategy requires undertaking major―often irreversible―decisions aimed at long-term success in an uncertain future. Are you looking to think more clearly and build transparent, functional teams that work in a better, streamlined way?Jesper Sørensen is joining us to help you out. He is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford GSB, and the author of “Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage.”Listen as Greg and Jesper touch on consequential assumptions, the process of pivoting, constructive argumentation and discuss why do people dread those annual strategy meetings.Episode Quotes:The dreaded strategy meeting:So I think that's one part of it, stop thinking about strategy as something you only do once a year. You should always be talking about strategy. Like you should always be thinking about events that happen and things that work and that don't work in terms of the strategy. But in so many organizations strategy is this thing that happens once a year, it happens in the C-suite right? And a consulting firm comes in and tells me what the strategy is.Power and politics within organizations:Politics is a positive thing when done well, right? Cause it's about balancing different agendas and that's what organizations are, they’re constellations of people with different goals and you're trying to get them all to march in the same direction. But I think It's much more likely to succeed if there is a broader kind of understanding, it's okay, whatever we're going to do, our minimum criteria is it has to make sense. And we have a standard for whether it makes sense which is I can see the logic of it and I can see it in the logic of being coherent.Jesper’s mantra:JESPER: My favorite kind of slogan that I came up with during the process of doing this was this idea of - in the process of strategy formulation, really the mantra should be “Validity Today, Soundness Tomorrow.” Which means - GREG: I really like that JESPER: Yeah, strategy formulation, right, is about an uncertain future. You can't know the truth of all of your assumptions. And at least if you are certain of the truth of all your assumptions, then it's probably not a very exciting strategy because there's no risk and therefore less reward.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Stanford Graduate School of BusinessJesper B. Sørensen on LinkedinJesper B. Sørensen on TwitterJesper B. Sørensen on QuartzHis work:Jesper B. Sørensen on Google ScholarMaking Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Leo Katz’s work focuses on criminal law and legal theory. By connecting criminal law, moral philosophy, and the theory of social choice, he tries to shed light on some of the most basic building block notions of the law.He is a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of numerous articles and books including “Ill-Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law,” “Bad Acts and Guilty Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law,” and of course, “Why the Law Is So Perverse”.If you never went to law school, this episode will give you a glimpse of what its like. Leo and Greg run through a number of hypothetical cases and legal theories covering black mail, irrational preference ordering, loopholes, consent, and pain as punishment.Episode Quotes:Gray solutions:When people decide not to go to court, it's often because they realize there's a 50% chance it'll go one way, 50% chance it'll go the other way, so we'll settle on 50% of the damage award. But then you wonder, so why doesn't the law do that? I mean, it's an in-between case, so wouldn't the sensible outcome be an in-between verdict? Wouldn't that correspond to the justice of the situation? But it's not what the law does. Although an increasing number of people believe it should and have argued for that.Consent problems: You've got different kinds of consent problems. One is you can't trade it at all. And then others, you just can't give it in advance. it has to be contemporaneous consent, but if it has to be contemporaneous consent, I mean, that often un-does the point of the bargain as in the case of these contracts for performance over service.Duress Defense:The way the law deals with dilemmas is not the way the economist or the consequentialist initially thinks is a sensible way, but instead by accepting intransitivity. And dealing with dilemmas by accepting intransitivity means we're kind of in a different world than that of ordinary consequentialist rationality. We're not in the world of irrationality, but we're in a world that actually pretty much tracks deontological morality.The trolley problem:In most such situations, the trolley problem being this case of this trolley, that heads down a track and if we just let it go, it's going to run over five people. But if we divert it to the side it's going to kill one person, then we will have saved the five. And then there are many other situations of more controversial nature where we can save many at the cost of killing one. And from the consequentialist point of view, putting to the side sort of certain systemic difficulties if this becomes known, they would say everything else being equal, that's what we ought to do. It's a dilemma in the sense that it's unfortunate that someone has to die, but it's not really a dilemma for decision-making. In that it's kind of clear what makes sense. Now what's so striking about the law is that it tends not to do that. In many cases it forbids this sort of trade off.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of Pennsylvania Professional Profile at The American Law InstituteHis work:Bad Acts and Guilty Minds: Conundrums of the Criminal Law (Studies in Crime and Justice)Why the Law Is So PerverseIll-Gotten Gains: Evasion, Blackmail, Fraud, and Kindred Puzzles of the Law Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most people agree that nearly everything human is a mixture of both genetic inputs and cultural inputs. The question is about where the dividing line lies.Cecilia Heyes is a senior research fellow in theoretical life sciences and a professor of psychology at All Souls College at the University of Oxford. She also authored the book “Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking.”Cecilia and Greg talk in depth about theory of mind from early childhood development to how it is interpreted across different cultures, and dive into the debate between nature and culture that's been around since the pre-Socratics.Episode Quotes:Theory of the mind in different cultures: We tend to call it theory of mind or mind reading, wherever in the world we find it. In fact, mind reading or theory of mind is our way of predicting behavior. Other cultures have ways of predicting and explaining each other's behavior which depend much less on the ascription of thoughts and feelings.Imitation and caregivers:So there is some evidence that people who when they were infants, their mothers were depressed, show a weaker capacity to imitate facial expressions and so on. A depressed person is less emotionally reactive to others.So whereas typically parents will mirror the facial expressions of their infant. Inadvertently, they're giving the infant the opportunity to see what they, the infant looked like when they do something that feels like this. And that's the capacity which is crucial for imitation. You've gotta be able to map the feel onto the sight. And a parent mirroring back facial expressions is crucial to learning that. And depressed mothers quite understandably are doing less of that mirroring.Learning imitation:Dancers in particular, those wall mirrors which are very often in dance studios, mean that every move you make in that room, you feel yourself doing it as it were, you've got the internal feedback from the performance.You can feel the muscles stretching and so on. And that is being correlated with the sight of yourself doing it from the outside. And it's that kind of experience, that kind of sensory motor correlation, which is building your capacity to imitate.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at All Souls College at the University of OxfordProfessional Profile at The British AcademyCecilia Heyes on TwitterHer work:Cecilia Heyes on Google ScholarCognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Brains arrive at the conclusion that they have an internal, subjective experience of things — an experience that is non-physical and inexplicable. How can such a thing be studied scientifically?That is just part of the mission behind Michael Graziano’s lab. He is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Princeton University, and the author of  “The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor System”, “God Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit World”, and “Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience”, to name a few. Michael and Greg dive into consciousness, what we mean when we talk about schemas, how we inhabit our bodies, and the sophisticated attention that makes humans what we are. Episode Quotes:Theory of preserving bodies in the future:It is kind of assumed in the futurism world, assumed that technology is forever and the human body is fragile. And so what you want to do is upload yourself into a machine or put your body into a robot and then you'll live forever or whatever the fantasy is. It is true that the exact opposite is what actually happens. That a human body, if taken care of properly lives 90 to 100 years. And your typical machine lasts 10 years. So actually the approach to technology would have to change also. If you want this kind of longevity that people are looking for. Because the machine world is actually not a long lived world. Machines break a lot faster than biological bodies break, at least right now they do.Question of consciousness:I think I'm a little unusual. Because most people think the question of consciousness is a question of philosophy. And it is that partly. I think it's a question of technology and the immediate near term future of technology. That's what the question of consciousness really is right now. Humans & theory of mind:[00:36:16] There are different views on this, here's what I think. Humans are hyper social. Our success as a species, our world dominance, rests entirely on our amazing, intuitive ability to guess what someone else is thinking. So theory of mind or building models of other people's minds. Without that, we're nothing, we're just separate animals. With that, we’re civilization.How the brain constructs models:The brain constructs models that are useful. It does not construct models that are literally accurate. Like that's not the point. Evolution does not give us models that are literally accurate to edify us with scientific accuracy, no. Evolution shapes, models that are useful.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Princeton Neuroscience InstituteMichael Graziano on LinkedinMichael Graziano on TEDxCornellUniversityHis work:Graziano LabRethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience The Intelligent Movement Machine: An Ethological Perspective on the Primate Motor SystemGod Soul Mind Brain: A Neuroscientist's Reflections on the Spirit WorldDeath My Own WayThe Divine FarceThe Love Song of MonkeyThe Last Notebook of Leonardo (LeapKids)Squiggle (LeapKids)Billy and the BirdfrogsThe Spaces Between Us: A Story of Neuroscience, Evolution, and Human Nature Consciousness and the Social Brain Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

How can finance professionals balance self-interest, client service, and the greater good? While finance is often portrayed as an occupation that is fraught with self-dealing and unethical behavior, it can also be an arena for promoting good and even a path to a life of virtue. JC de Swaan argues for this idea in his latest book “Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry,” de Swaan teaches at Princeton University, and is also a partner at Cornwall Capital. How do you prevent the norms of the industry from changing who you are? Greg and JC discuss this idea, as well as Robinhood, ethical career choice, saying no to a client, and teaching Ethics in Finance.Episode Quotes:On ethics & finance:I think my entry point into this topic of ethics and finance is this idea that finance tends to be played as a complex game with its own rules. And as long as you play within well-defined, narrowly defined rules, then it's a force for good. And finance professionals by and large tend to be a little unquestioning, as to the fact that what is good for them is good for their clients and what is good for their clients is good for them. And then as a result, it's good for society, but we know that that's not the case.What kind of student he likes to teach:I generally want that diversity of views. I want like half of the students who are going to be, those who since they were 12, they woke up early to watch CNBC and they're trading their own portfolio, and they're really gung ho by then, and they know the language and all that. And I want the students who are super distrustful of the industry and don't believe that it's a force for good.Trading with care:And the way I think about it is that as you think of your professional mandate, and to your point, it's not just giving to clients anything they want, but it's also promoting the kind of products that you would suggest to members of your family. Or members of your tribe, the people that you actually cared about. Right? And so this idea that if you are promoting a product that you would never want your children to buy, for instance, or your mother, or whoever you really cared about, then that's a red flag. Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Princeton UniversityProfessional Profile at Princeton UniversityHis work:Seeking Virtue in Finance: Contributing to Society in a Conflicted Industry Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

87% of digital transformation initiatives fail to meet expectations. Do we raise expectations too high or is it really a problem of a failure to implement or execute the transformation?Didier Bonnet joins us today to sort this out. He is a former executive vice president at the consulting firm Capgemini and currently a professor of strategy and digital transformation at IMD Business School. He also co-authored “Leading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation”  and the more recent “Hacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate Your Business Transformation''.Didier and Greg discuss what the right questions are to ask your executive team, fashionistas, the role of the Chief Digital Officer, as well as digital governance.Episode Quotes:What does the future of this work look like:We're still organizing in pretty traditional ways. And in fact, I really believe, and we're not there yet but that the next wave of digital transformation will probably be much more about organizational innovation than digital innovation. And the reason I'm saying that is because of course the flow of technology will continue to happen.Engineers and inventors are doing their job of inventing stuff and they're doing a great job. So we'll see this continuous flow of amazing technology coming. But unless we start adapting our organization, it's going to become very hard to work efficiently.Why do so many transformations fail to meet expectations:I think one of the problems there is people, the minute they make the investment in the technology, they think the job's done. And they tend to really underestimate the transformation part. So everybody focuses on the digital rather than on the transformation and, and for anybody who was done, or looked at business transformation in an organization, it's always the people in the organizational side that's the most difficult to crack.What does digital transformation look like in modern times:I mean, today, pretty much every executive I meet, you know, within five seconds, you're talking about digital transformation.And I think as you mentioned earlier, it's got to the point where, you know, is it actually meaningful? Because you have people who provide cloud software services claiming to be doing digital transformation, you have automation companies claiming to do digital transformation. So everyone is doing digital transformation to the point where I think it's lost a little bit of it's meaning to some extent. So I think I'm always arguing for going back to first principles to say, okay what, what do you actually do on Monday morning?Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at IMD Business SchoolProfessional Profile at CapgeminiDidier Bonnet’s WebsiteDidier Bonnet on LinkedinDidier Bonnet on TwitterDidier Bonnet on FacebookDidier Bonnet on YoutubeHis work:Hacking Digital: Best Practices to Implement and Accelerate Your Business TransformationLeading Digital: Turning Technology into Business Transformation Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Platforms are eating the world! While not every business is becoming a platform business in the strictest sense, every company needs to re-examine its business model and consider adopting platform elements if they are to survive in the new ecosystem oriented economy.Geoff Parker is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College, as well as a visiting scholar and research fellow at MIT. He is also the coauthor of “Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for You.”Greg and Geoff cover thinking of companies as pipelines, the case of McCormick Spices, pitfalls companies make when trying to launch platforms, and governance issues. Episode Quotes:Platform governance issues:Geoff: So the way that I think about platform governance is, do they have rules essentially to ensure fair treatment of users?Greg: This is like, it's almost like due process. Geoff: Exactly Is there due process and do they have the ability to actually credibly deliver that? So if you have a dispute, is there a resolution mechanism? If they said they're going to charge 10% or whatever, did they or did they charge 50%? If they said they weren't going to basically replicate your technology and, sort of destroying your particular app or business, did they adhere to that in a credible way?How do you retroactively take something that was built in a more appliance like format converted into a modular system?:Some things actually just need to do a single thing and do it really well. And then other things can be built in this more modular format. So I think it's being intentional about where you need to be delivering basic electricity and just do it at scale, basic compute, do it at scale. Versus, okay, now I've got to have this mix and match or usability, and that's where I'm going to invest in making that possible.What are some pitfalls people make when trying to launch platforms: The ones that I think are really deadly are where they try to capture value before they create it for users. That's a cautionary tale, I think, especially for incumbents who are pipeline firms. Then they analyze, they dream up some total addressable market and they get starry-eyed and get all excited about that.How do you first brainstorm a platform idea for an existing company:So, essentially I think the way to think about it is how do I find different sources of value that my users, and the users can be on the supply side or on the demand side, can take advantage of that will make it stickier.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Dartmouth College Geoff Parker’s WebsiteGeoff Parker on LinkedinGeoff Parker on TwitterSpeakers Profile at Stern Strategy GroupHis work:Geoff Parker on Google ScholarPlatform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy and How to Make Them Work for YouOperations Management For Dummies Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

David Yoffie has been a professor at Harvard Business School for 40 years where he has authored hundreds of cases, and a number of books, the most recent being “The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation and Power.”He has been writing about technology and digital for a long time, and has served on the boards of numerous companies that are at the heart of this digital explosion over the last couple of decades. But it's only recently that we have formulated an understanding of what we now call platforms. So what is it about platforms that make them unique?Listen as David and Greg discuss network effects and strategy, the distinction between a transaction platform and an innovation platform, and the age old question: can you teach an old dog new tricks? Episode Quotes:How the internet changed platforms:The internet enabled a much broader range of activity to take place where you could connect two sides of a market together. And it accelerated the opportunities to drive revenue. It accelerated the opportunity to build network effects. And so it led to an explosion of platforms that wouldn't have been possible in the absence of something like the internet.On Markets: The single biggest problem for any platform is which side of the market is the profit making side, and which side is the loss-making side, and how do you make that equation work? And it seems like it should be obvious, but it turns out to be incredibly difficult. Intermediating & circumventing apps:It's a constant problem. Again, what does the platform do? It connects two independent parties. Well, now the question is why do I need the platform in the middle once I've been connected? Should platforms be curating?:If you are a forward-thinking platform today, with significant market presence and market power, you should be curating, you should be making the investment to clean your platform. And if you don't, the consequences are much more likely to be detrimental to the long-term health of your business.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional Profile at Stanford UniversitySpeakers Profile on Speaking.comDavid Yoffie on LinkedinHis work:The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and PowerStrategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Job Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

César Hidalgo is the director of the Center for Collective Learning at the University of Toulouse, known for his contributions to economic complexity, data visualization, and applied artificial intelligence. His books include “How Humans Judge Machines,” and “Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies.”César joins Greg to discuss knowledge vs know how, Services vs products, backlash against algorithmic bias and keeping entropy at bay.Episode Quotes:Judging humans vs machines:We find that there is something more, that people use a different moral philosophy to judge humans and to judge machines. We judge humans with a moral philosophy that is based on what the person was trying to do, it's about intention, motivation. And we judge machines with a moral philosophy that is consequentialist. What is the outcome of the scenario? We don't care if the machine was trying to do the right thing, or was trying to rescue the people, or was trying to avoid the accident.The gist of his work as a physicist:That's one of the things that I think as a physicist, I help bring maybe through the book to a more general audience which is, people tend to think of information as something that is non physical. But in some way, everything has to have some sort of physical embodiment.Transferring knowledge:As our society becomes more of a knowledge society, even the forces of inequality become larger because few people can create things that are so scalable, so productive, that they can be exported to everywhere with very small transportation cost. Products vs. services:Products are not just one thing here or there in the economy. They are actually something that is really key. It's very different from a service because it has that scalable property of being able to endow others with the practical uses of knowledge that otherwise would be trapped in a small team.​​Thoughts on his career path: I like to say life is too short to have one career. And it sounds counterintuitive but since life is short, you want to try a lot of things because you get only one life. And in that context, I've loved exploring different things and going deep into different topics at different stages in my life.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at University of ToulouseCésar Hidalgo’s WebsiteCésar Hidalgo on LinkedinCésar Hidalgo on TwitterCésar Hidalgo on TED TalkHis work:César Hidalgo on Google ScholarHow Humans Judge MachinesWhy Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to EconomiesThe Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.