A lot of office culture today emphasizes productivity. But learning remains essential, and often gets left behind. Who has the time?

Dmitry Koltunov makes the case for making time through a formal office book club:

Sometimes you need to slow down to speed up. To grow ALICE from three of us to 30 people, and to get through the early stage hurdles, we had to find a way to prioritize learning as a team. So we started an office bookclub. No other tradition has had more of a positive impact on our culture, our processes and our product.

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Tobin Aldrich:

an advertisement should have a primary objective, which is either response or brand building. If the primary purpose of the advertisement is unclear it commonly will fail to achieve either.

That’s from a great article on nonprofits and DRTV.

Henry Ward (no relation) explains his principles for hiring an excellent team:

1. Hire for Strength vs Lack of Weakness
2. Hire for Trajectory vs Experience
3. Hire Doers vs Tellers
4. Hire Learners vs Experts
5. Hire Different vs Similar
6. Always pass on ego

To find excellent employees, you have to take risks, he argues. “Do not be afraid of hiring False Positives. Give people chances. Be afraid of missing the 20x employee.”

His critique of Built to Last and corporate culture is also on point.

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Maciej Cegłowski says websites have become too bloated:

The problem with picking any particular size as a threshold is that it encourages us to define deviancy down. Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.

I would like to anchor the discussion in something more timeless.

To repeat a suggestion I made on Twitter, I contend that text-based websites should not exceed in size the major works of Russian literature.

The whole thing is brilliant.

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I was shopping around online recently for a finance app. Nearly every app’s website listed the same set of features: I can import transactions from my bank; I can set budgets; I can use a mobile app.

Almost none of the apps’ websites explained why their product was better than the other guy’s. They didn’t distinguish themselves on reliability, trustedness, ease of use, popularity, or much else.

This left me lost, and forced me into time-consuming demos and trials when some sharp marketing could have sealed the deal a lot sooner.

Peep Laja says it better than I could. He explains that lots of customers are like me: they shop around. Not only that,

sometimes they compare 10+ websites before deciding where to buy from. (The only exception seems to be users part of loyalty programs, such as Amazon Prime, hotel rewards memberships, etc.)

Yet, so many websites don’t list a single reason to buy from them.

Everyone’s got problems, and people are generally busy and superficial. They’re not reading everything on your website, instead they’re scanning. If it’s not explicit why they should buy from you, the competitor who makes it clear wins.

It’s not about listing your features or your benefits as such. It’s about explaining why what you’re selling is the best possible use of my money right now.