Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and entrepreneurship micro-summaries for July 24, 2019

Becoming a digital platform leader; Learning politics at the family dinner; Ford's electric F-150 towing 1 million pounds of train; The relationship between workplace injuries and deaths due to suicide or drug overdose; Steem Business Alliance (SBA) - roadmap progress update

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Straight from my RSS feed:

Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.

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1. How To Be a Digital Platform Leader - In an interview, Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge web site discusses the book, The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power, by David Yoffie and coauthors Michael A. Cusumano and Annabelle Gawer. Drawing on examples like Uber, Airbnb, Microsoft, and Amazon, Yoffie argues that platforms may represent the dominant business model of the 21^st century, and goes on to argue that transaction platforms and innovation are different things, and should not be lumped together. Yoffie also asserts that platforms will continue becoming more important. The factors that lead to this conclusion include the so-called network effect, the ability for users to "multi-home, the homogeneity of products, and meaningful supply-side scale economies. The interview also cautions that most platform launches fail due to common mistakes including: pricing the product wrong, failure to build and maintain trust, mistiming the market, and hubris. For traditional businesses to extend into platforms, Yoffie offers three possibilities: become a member of an existing platform; buy a platform; or build one. In conclusion, the article notes that platforms can be a double-edged sword, with productivity benefits on one side, and disinformation and abusive content on the other, which means that curation will also become increasingly important.


2. How to use family dinner to teach politics - In this TED talk, Hajer Sharief describes the 20-year tradition of the weekly family meeting in her household, which enabled her and her siblings to negotiate solutions to disagreements and participate in family decision making. She describes how engaging in this process as a child also infused her with the skills needed to navigate the political landscape as an adult outside the context of her own family.


3. Ford shows off electric F-150 truck by towing a million pounds of train - With more than 1.1 million sales in 2018, the F-150 is America's #1 selling light vehicle (I drove one for about 7 years in the early 2000s), but many of those customers may be skeptical of the strength of an electric motor in a pickup truck. Perhaps this video will satisfy some of the skeptics (skip forward to about 2:50 for the actual towing):
   
   

Alarming research shows that serious workplace injuries may have dire implications beyond work — and be linked to suicide rates - From the article: "...An injury severe enough to keep an employee home for at least a week almost tripled the combined risk of suicide and drug overdose death among women, and raised that risk 50% among men, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine on Tuesday..." Breaking those numbers down, men were 72% more likely to die from suicide, and 29% more likely to die of drug overdose. Women's likelihood increased by 92% for suicide and a striking 193% for drug overdoses. The conclusions were reached by studying data from 100,000 New Mexico workers with lost-time injuries between 1994 and 2000, social security data, and workers compensation data. The report doesn't suggest a reason for the difference between the sexes, and it is limited by the fact that it only looked at one state. These findings are consistent with a 2016 Canadian study that found that close to 10% of people who miss work for more than 5 days are diagnosed with depression within the next year.

STEEM Introducing Steem Business Alliance Members & Roadmap Progress Update - 18 businesses are attending bi-weekly meetings for the Steem Business Alliance (SBA), and the group has met all of its Q1 and Q2 roadmap objectives. Goals for this quarter include: Establish a best practice database and shared resource database; Form the first working group; Create a structure for paying customers to access the databases; Shepherd a governance document through to receiving committee approval. (A beneficiary setting of 5% for @steemba has been applied to this post.)

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About this series

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