What TNW is reading (week 1)

A new year means only one thing, an epic list of unobtainable and suitably vague goals that we’ll have forgotten about come February.

But this year the people at TNW are trying to make our resolutions a little more ‘attainable’. One of them is to read more. So each week, four members of the team will share what they’re loving. It can be an article, a book, a novella, heck, even a Haiku. If we love it, we share it.

Ready? Let’s go.

The Problem With Technological Ignorance – Slate

Arthur C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And he was right, for a while. 

Now I see my daughter using a shared document to work on homework assignments with eight other kids, at the same time, while also FaceTiming, listening to Spotify, posting to Facebook and replying to 3,000 messages on WhatsApp. She doesn’t think this is weird or magical. She thinks it is normal.

Sometimes I’m jealous at how quickly new generations adopt new technology, even take it for granted. Other times I want to shout at them and explain how I watched the introduction of the first Macintosh and about how much we’ve gained since then. This article captures this feeling very well.

-Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, CEO

Lessons from the Woman Who Built Squarespace’s Customer Care Team from 1 to 184 – First Round Review

This year I was given the opportunity to escalate our marketing team from two to 15 people and this has proven to be a very challenging task. Who to hire, to what job positions and how to organize the new team.

In this post, Christa Collins gives insights into how she set up the customer care team for SquareSpace, scaling a company to over a 184 people! If you ever had to set up a team or will have to, this read is very inspiring and may provide you with some nice ideas.

–Martijn Scheijbeler, Marketing Director

Collaborative Overload – Harvard Business Review

Over the past two decades, the time spent by managers and employees collaborating has doubled. But up to a third of value-added collaborations come from only three to five percent of employees.

While many people are championing this collectivization, an article from Harvard Business Review explores the real cost to people not being allowed to work on their own. I’ve spent most of my professional career freelancing and as such working away from others.

Adjusting to working in an international team has been a challenge, but this piece has helped explain how collaboration in some cases is great. However, sometimes we need to encourage our employees to complete their critical work without distraction.

-Matt Hussey, Editor-in-Chief

Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry – Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

Losing the Signal describes the rise and fall of Blackberry. It is a fascinating story that gives insight in how BlackBerry became the leading mobile device company and also how they lost their grip on the market, the boardroom decisions they made that were crucial to their decline are spelled out for all to see. Besides that, it’s a nice read full of lessons we should all learn.

-Patrick de Laive, Co-founder

This is a #TNWLife article, a look into life and work at The Next Web.