March 25 2025 Hong Kong

I spend a lot of time being asked about information overload and how to metabolize  change. 

Perhaps, like me, you love reading, synthesizing and making sense of what’s going on. My idea metabolism far outpaces my gut metabolism for sure.

But this past two weeks, whoa! I’ve ingested so many perspective-tweaking ideas, global conversations and “what happens when we pull this lever?” leadership headlines that I’m sure we all feel a bit, well, clogged. 

The synthesis machine is down for maintenance this week.

So in an effort to crowd-source my sense-making, I’m sharing with you smart cookies 3 perspectives of the day that are surfacing in my world:

1. Hyper legibility (Packy McCormick, Not Boring, h/t to Andrew Massey)

In an era of information overload, individuals and organizations that can make their ideas extremely easy to understand, win. It is reshaping how we communicate, compete and innovate. Packy provocatively calls this “trading secrets for attention” but that’s not new (see Oprah, Jerry Springer, all social media). 

Still, our desperate attempt to impose order on chaos and its implications are in line with the “AI commodifies knowledge” narrative, making relationships, getting things done, process that creates new forms of value and “having a guy” rise in value. As with any trend, the countertrend may be a craving for magic, wonder and things that require hard work to understand. 

An interesting trend I see is tiers that serve up your ideas at the level of legibility you prefer or need. Legal reads the latest AI legislation, Google Notebook gives a broad-based 20 min podcast on it for those of us who need to know, but not the details.

2. Jevon’s Paradox (Tina He, FakePixels, h/t to Paul Millerd)

Tina tickles our deepest, darkest fear – that the very tools designed to free us from labor will trap us in an endless cycle of escalating productivity and competition and that it will be a trap of our own making. My fave line in her essay?

“Efficiency doesn’t tame our appetites; it whets them. Our innovations become trampolines for our desires.”

Her answer is similar to themes I’ve been exploring for some time: measuring what matters, time affluence, redefining success, and open-sourcing ideas (hence this newsletter). Worth a read for the poetic writing as much as the thinking.

3. Great cultures need to set workers free (Make Work Better, Bruce Daisley)

If AI “makes intelligence ubiquitous”, will human agency be the key to organizational competitive edge? In contrast to Packy’s focus on “getting things done” as a differentiator, this essay agrues that we humans can focus on the why and what and leave the AI to the how to get things done.