Amazon’s voice-operated command center Echo produces something close to modern-day magic within our homes: Get the latest news, order a pizza, turn off the lights or find out who killed Bruce Wayne’s parents in fewer than 1,200 milliseconds. Read More
The group files into the theater, buzzing. People hustle to get to the front row, sitting side by side, no empty seats. The event starts on time, the excitement is palpable.
The other group wanders in. The front row is empty and stays that way. There are two or even three empty seats between each individual. The room is sort of dead.
In both cases, the CEO or the guest speaker is going to address the group for an hour. But the two groups couldn't be more different.
The first organization sees possibility, the second sees risk and threat. The first group is eager to explore a new future, the second group misses the distant past.
The truth is this: it's possible to hire for, train for and lead a front-row organization. And if you merely let entropy take over, you're going to end up with the second, lesser, failing organization instead.
Worth saying this as clearly as possible: The culture, the choice of front row or back row, is a choice. It's the result of investment and effort.
Where would you rather work?
Want to develop for Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality platform but don’t want to pay $3,000 for the developer kit? Until now, it looked like you were out of luck, but as Microsoft announced today, you will soon be able to use a HoloLens emulator to write your applications even if you don’t own the actual hardware. The emulator, as well as all of Microsoft’s other… Read MoreThere, in six words, is one of the worst questions any educator can hear.
It lays bare, in a simple question, the motivations, the structures and the flaws of the traditional educational paradigm. The test is a stick, the grade (and the degree) are the carrot, and compliance is the process.
I just published a long Medium post about how this mindset was the unseen standard as educators moved online, and why it can’t work (and what we can do about it.) I hope you'll take a minute to check it out.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and chief legal officer, gave a passionate defense of encryption today, saying his company stood with Apple in its legal battle with the FBI. He made his remarks during a keynote address at the RSA security conference in San Francisco. Read More
Microsoft announced a new tool today called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection designed to help IT detect threats to Windows 10 machines after a threat has penetrated the network. While most security strategy to this point has focused on keeping bad actors out of the network, there is a sense of inevitability that no matter how careful a company is that the defenses will break down… Read MoreIf you've ever been rejected (grad school, an article submission, a job) you may have spent some time analyzing the rejection letter itself, reading between the lines, trying to figure out why you were actually rejected.
The thing is, there's almost nothing written between lines.
People rarely say what they mean when they reject you. It's just not worth the risk. Not worth saying, "I'm filled with fear about taking this sort of chance on you." Not worth the blowback of saying, "you're a miserable writer, the bane of my existence, and you will never amount to anything." It'll just come back to haunt them.
And of course, if you do read that sort of apparently honest screed in a rejection letter, it's just as likely to be about the writer as it is about you and your work.
Make a pile of the thousands of rejection letters that successful people have received over the years and analyze them for insights and patterns—you won't find much of use.
Short version: You got rejected. The words and the tone of the rejection aren't going to tell you much, and every moment you spend dissecting them is a way to hide from the real work of making something that will resonate tomorrow.
If you really want to know why someone didn't like your work, you're going to have to put a lot more effort into it understanding the person who rejected you. Reading the tea leaves in the rejection letters and one-star reviews is pretty worthless.
