Thought Leadership

You're Scott Forstall. It's 2005. Apple's hugely successful iPod business is facing an existential threat from cell phones that can play music. Your boss, Steve Jobs, has ordered you to assemble a team of software engineers to create-in a matter of months-what would become the first iPhone. Quick!

Studies suggest American schools invest $18 billion in teachers' professional learning annually. But considerable evidence indicates that formal professional development often misses the mark. And while teachers are also learning in informal ways, existing systems don't track or make the most of that growth.

For David Chase, HBO was the last port of call. He had spent the previous year shopping his idea for a new drama series to the big broadcasters. One by one, they passed. Fox wanted simpler storylines. CBS asked why the main character had to be in therapy.

Over the second half of the 1990s, Porsche hatched plans for a new car. Annual sales were a third of what they'd been the decade prior, so the company badly needed a turnaround. The car hit the market in 2003.

"Liminal Thinking is the art of creating change by understanding, shaping, and reframing beliefs." We're proud to be kicking off the release of XPLANE founder Dave Gray's book, Liminal Thinking, this month. Dave's insights and ideas have left our team feeling motivated to create positive change in our lives, our business, and the world.

Andrew Wilkinson's career is an extraordinary manifestation of the adage "fake it 'til you make it." When he first started out as a freelance designer, Wilkinson-a teenager at the time-masqueraded as the head of a large agency, cold called prospects, and booked $15,000 of work in his first month of operation.

One of the most famous tech-related commentaries expressed in the past 10 years is Steve Jobs's declaration of the "post-PC era." While the Apple founder's quote in early June of 2010 referred specifically to the revolution that the iPad was expected to bring, the phrase has evolved into a nearly universal commentary about transitions in the tech market.

You're asking a question that I love to hear because I am an artist, and my life has, in many ways, been devoted to visual thinking and visualization. When I think of a vision, the thing that comes to mind is that it's an exercise of imagination.

Caryn Marooney was a repeat presenter at First Round's recent CEO Summit - but she was still nervous. After all, last year she'd spoken about external communications, the more glamorous side of comms. This year, we asked her to share the lessons she's learned about internal communications since becoming Facebook's VP of Technology Communications five years ago, and previously as co-founder and CEO of elite PR firm OutCast.

Last fall, we overheard that Twitter Engineering Director David Loftesness had some solid wisdom about training newly-minted engineering managers - an often precarious transition. So we sat down with him to see what tips he had to offer, and we were blown away.

Trees have inspired how people understand the world around them for millennia. The worship of trees, known as dendrolatry, is present in practically all cultures and their ability to represent spreading connections has inspired many to adopt their form for a wide variety of knowledge representations.

In just four years, Adam Pisoni helped grow Yammer from a team of five with an idea to a company of 500 worth a billion dollars. Today, he's back to square one, working on a brand new company with just a handful of people - and one question dominates his mind: "What do I want to do differently this time?"

When Kenneth Berger joined Slack in June 2014, the company was at the beginning of its much-buzzed-about ascent. As its first product manager, he managed the product's functionality as it grew from 100,000 to 1M+ daily users - all within his first year.

For five years, Meenal Balar 's job was to figure out how to get more people to use - everywhere in the world. In 2009, as the growth team was just coming together, the company already had its eyes fixed on a billion users, and Balar was one of the key players that would get them there by answering questions like: How do we onboard mobile-only users?

There is one big advantage in blogging about many different subjects at the intersection of Organizations, Cultures and 21st century : the opportunity of bridging communities. As #hypertextual early years heroine danah boyd puts it, it is to make connections where none existed before. Within that scope, #hypertextual is over-excited to publish a conversation with Michael...

The memo below was sent to the team at Tiny Speck, the makers of Slack , on July 31st, 2013. It had been a little under seven months since development began and was two weeks before the launch of Slack's 'Preview Release'.

If save-for-later service Pocket had a spirit animal, it'd be the American field ant. Like the insect, the startup supports that which is many times its own size. It serves its 20 million registered users - who have saved over 2 billion articles and videos for later - with a team of just 20 employees.

I spent most of my early career proclaiming that "This!" was the "year of mobile". The year of mobile was actually 2007 when the iPhone launched and accelerated a revolution around mobile computing. As The Economist recently put it "Just eight years later Apple's iPhone exemplifies the early 21st century's defining technology."

I don't recall exactly what was going through my mind that morning, 30 years ago this summer, when a group of us in Tysons Corner, Va., launched a start-up called Quantum Computer Services, later renamed America Online. I do recall what was going through my parents' minds, though: bewilderment.

This essay is excerpted from the ebook Interaction Design Best Practices: Mastering the Tangibles by Jerry Cao, Kamil Zieba and Matt Ellis of UXPin, a UX design platform. It's an old argument: should designers code? And it gets a lot of people up in arms, some in favor while others not so much.

Are you struggling to break down organizational silos, increase creativity, engagement and collaboration? Do you feel like the people in your company are resisting change? Is your company's culture holding you back? One of the most difficult - yet most important - aspects of any business transformation is culture change.

Editor's note: Dan Kaplan helps startups tell their stories . He's done marketing for Twilio, Asana, and Salesforce, and is preparing to launch Dispatches From The Future , a podcast about the future of humanity. In his book Zero To One , Peter Thiel has some harsh things to say about lean startups.

LinkedIn PDF

This article is by Adam Pisoni, co-founder and former CTO of Yammer. He is also a founder of Responsive.org, a new movement dedicated to helping companies become more adaptive and empowering. If you don't regularly read Steve Denning's work, you should. He's one of the better writers on the future of work.

Interview with David Puttnam Podcasting Project Apple 2008

"We're probably at the death of education right now. I think the structures and strictures of school and learning from nine to three, working on your own, not working with others, I think that's dead or dying. And I think that learning is just beginning."

Dave Gray presentation on The Connected Company

I love reading blogs by founders who try to give back and share what they've learned building their companies, so today I'll try and do the same. When I look back over the last 15 years building 4 different companies (most recently Bigcommerce), here are some things I'd do different if I was to start another company, as well as a few things I wouldn't change.