If you are looking for business stuff, follow or connect with me on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/bakevin Personal/game stuff will be Mastodon @rentagurkha@dice.camp

This has held up pretty well…

We are very saddened to hear of the passing of Vernor Vinge, whose ZONES OF THOUGHT books are perennial SFMasterwork bestsellers. RIP.

#SourceCallout: Looking for an AI expert to chat today for a Toronto Star story. Details available upon request — send me a DM or email at aisling(dot)aly(dot)murphy(at)gmail(dot)com!

Want a free print copy of Chains of Asmodeus? This massive campaign supports @ExtraLife4Kids — retweet this post to enter, show me a recent donation to #ExtraLife for 3 entries! tinyurl.com/freechains Will pick a winner at noon CST this Friday! #dmsguild #5e #dnd

HYPERBOREA Giveaway! I was cleaning the office and stumbled upon THREE extra sets of a special promotion we did last year: Rats in the Walls (signed), an enamel Hyperborea pin, and a Hyperborea d20. So, I am going to give these three sets away! (Each winner gets a signed Rats book, a pin, and a d20.) I'll ship anywhere in the world, unless you live in a country that is embargoed. Here are the rules: 1) Follow this page. 2) Like this post. 3) Retweet this post. You have to do all three or your entry will not count. I will announce the three winners on Monday night (US Eastern Time)! #hyperborea #rpg #ttrpg #HPLovecraft

Dear people: About use cases Ivar Jacobson, the inventor of use cases and co-creator of component-based development, UML and RUP, and Alistair Cockburn, author of a popular book on use cases and also co-author of the Agile Manifesto, got together to unify, simplify and

What is the future of Business Analysis? 🚀 Check out the full recording here: ow.ly/CuS050QsyAa #businessanalysis #businessanalyst #SoftwareDesign #batraining

Oh no.

A useful thread for those who may (like myself) have been ADHD for decades without knowing. I got “lucky” because business analysis/architecture/strategy turns out to trigger hyperfocus for me.

Last year I was diagnosed with ADHD. I haven't written about it much because the diagnosis was a shock. Now I have a more solid understanding of ADHD, how it presents for me, and ways to mitigate some of the downsides. So, for threadapalooza 2023, here's 100 tweets on ADHD

There is a real horror show of antisemitism and Islamophobia going on in this country, and it feels like there is no way through it, man. I personally have never seen it this bad. I say “rising” but that doesn’t capture it?? It’s been “rising” for years, now it’s full-blown wave

I absolutely would do this except for the obvious reason. However I know I have followers who would be a great fit.

A friend of mine said recently that he loves having written things but hates the process of writing them and I can deeply relate.

For anyone here who hasn’t worked in corporate strategy at a Fortune 500 company and wants to understand how utterly bone-headed decisions—such as changing your customers’ cell-phone plans unless they proactively call to opt out—get made, here’s a quick explainer 👇 This chain of events typically starts during a quarterly board of directors meeting, during which an independent director (generally a current or retired CEO of a company in a different, non-competing industry) says that the company isn’t making enough money and that it’s the fault of the CEO, who is a supremely unqualified buffoon. (Tangent: Every board director has his own pet favorite metric, be it growth (e.g., year-over-year sales), profitability (e.g., EBITDA margin), investor returns (e.g., change in share price if public, return on invested capital if private), or some byzantine metric that he used to love when he was the division president of a Ma Bell carve-out back in the 1980s (e.g., change in same-store gross profit divided by number of people on the sales team, raised to the power of pi and divided by 1998, which represents the year his current girlfriend was born). The exact metric doesn’t matter; what matters is that, by the standards thereof, the CEO sucks.) The independent director will then pull open the calculator app on his iPhone 7, punch some numbers in, and say something to the effect of, “If we can increase revenue per customer by just $5, our market cap will increase by billions. Get your strategy team to figure it out.” From here, the CEO and the CFO will then set up a meeting with the SVP of corporate strategy for 7:15 AM the next morning, to be held in the locker room of the country-club whose $20k annual membership dues the company’s shareholders generously cover. Sitting in the sauna, buck naked save for bleached white towels barely sufficient for the mission to which they’ve been called, the executives will decide that the most prudent course of action is to call McKinsey and pay them approximately $2.5M to figure this out for them. (Note: The CFO will get a quote from his buddy at Deloitte or KPMG, just to be able to tell the board that they solicited competing bids, but everyone knows that the work is just going to end up with McKinsey. Or Bain.) McKinsey will rapidly set up office in a large conference room on-site, as if it’s the makeshift command-and-control center of an air base in Kuwait on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and they’ll deploy a dozen MBAs with a weighted average age of 26.5 years across the company’s headquarters. The consultants will meticulously evaluate all levers for revenue growth, including M&A, organic growth from new customers, and organic growth from existing customers (either by reducing churn or just finding ways to get more money out of each one). M&A will quickly get crossed off the list, since McKinsey doesn’t want Goldman coming in and taking over, and new-customer growth is always just painful, so, by process of elimination, they’ll decide on getting more money from existing customers. After performing an analysis called a customer segmentation, McKinsey will realize that the company has already squeezed every last dollar possible out of the company’s highest-paying customers, whose loyalty is already pushed to the limit. They will therefore instead try to figure out how to get more money from lower-paying customers. Associate 1: How do we get more money from our cheapest customers? Associate 2: Can we go back to selling ring tones, like we did in 1998? Associate 1: I did a case study on that at HBS! Ten minutes go by. Anyway, that’s why it won’t work. What if we just… raised prices? Associate 2: These customers are highly price-sensitive. We can’t do that unless the customers think they’re getting additional value. [CONTINUED IN NEXT TWEET]

One of my odd blind spots is that I keep having to relearn that a lot of people aspire to positions of power because they like the status and perks, and have no actual aspirations to do anything with that power.

I have 4 Blue sky invites if someone wants one. First come first served.

Hey, followers, I have 2 invite codes to the sky place if you need them.

I mean, I’m not really qualified to judge but the early replication results sound actually promising? And if so this is a potential world-changer.