In his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin teaches us how to adopt a posture of possibility, change the culture, and choose to make a difference. Here are my takeaways from the episode.

In this podcast, Seth discusses status roles and why they matter.

Status roles are everywhere, and people define them differently and in many ways. However, one thing is for sure when describing the status role. The fact is there is a hierarchy. People interpret status and give some level of respect to others that are around them.

In our working world, there are plenty of people who have status because of their jobs. However, status is not always reflected in how much someone is being paid. Someone with a status role in one field may not always have a status role in other areas. It is part of human nature to have a status hierarchy that we have been shuffling around and dealing with for a long time.

Another way to think about the status role is who gets to eat lunch first or who has the privilege of deciding who gets to eat lunch first. Things start to get interesting when industrial capitalism shows up in the last 200 years. Then, more and more people decide to trade status for money and vice versa.

There are many things that money can buy, and we equate those things with indicators for status. The expensive cars, the high-priced clothing, and many expensive items but have low utility are just some examples of status representation. In many species, status goes to the creature that is the strongest. As human beings, we have found all sorts of ways to put our perceived status on display.

Interesting things can happen when someone has a perceived status role but does not get the expected favored treatment in return. One of the things going on in our culture right now is a reshuffling of the status hierarchy. A status role that used to be granted to someone who has a natural-born trait is being replaced by something else. Along the way, we have created many status roles based on what people do that did not exist in our culture before.

As status hierarchies get shifted around, it starts to leave stretch marks on the culture. We need to think hard about many of the assumptions we have made about status roles. For example, do we want to assume that rich people are also brilliant at doing something else? Do we want to assume that somebody who matches the current cultural definition of beauty is also somebody we want to extend the benefit of the doubt in other areas?

It is up to us to decide whether someone’s status in one area is directly applicable to other things they do. The high-status role creates celebrities. There were very few celebrities 200 years ago, but now we mint them like Bitcoin every day.

The question we might want to ask is what kind of culture do we want to see built? What status roles would support building such a culture? Should we create status roles that do not always equate to financial compensation? If we want to live in a world where doing good work was the point, we might want to consider having status roles that are not the shortcut to making a lot of money.

In his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin teaches us how to adopt a posture of possibility, change the culture, and choose to make a difference. Here are my takeaways from the episode.

In this podcast, Seth discusses the current event of supply chain difficulty and offers the following perspectives as we think about the problem.

There are two things an organization can do to improve its profit right away. The first thing is to lower the inventory and eliminate slack everywhere. Company executives consider slack in the system an enemy of profitability because the buffer space does not contribute to the profit except to incur costs for maintaining it.

When an organization can cut its inventory and slack, the action can improve the profit right away. By eliminating margin, the chief executives can look smart by quickly improving profitability without taking other more drastic measures.

All is well except the slack exists for a reason. The slack or buffer allows the organization to maintain the level of service when there are hiccups in the system. Slack can also address an unexpected customer demand and enable the firm to capitalize on the extra business. Unfortunately, with the buffer gone in many organizations, many organizations are running into distress in their systems because they no longer have the cushion to respond well to a sudden change in the business environment.

As many public companies are trying to extract every last penny of slack out of their systems, they also have to resort to the second tactic for maintaining profitability. If the system has no slack, the organizations also need to lower the expectations from the customers. Customer service is usually the first to cut as organizations put up many obstacles for customers to receive adequate customer service when the transactions did not go well via a stressed system.

Like in Darwinian evolution, when the climate changes, suddenly the animals that evolved to be in one niche are having trouble in the new environment. Many of these companies, which have made promises around convenience, reliability, and showing up to treat customers with respect, are getting more stressed. Unfortunately, since companies are not humans, the ones who will get stressed are the poor frontline workers, where their actions are being measured with a stopwatch every moment.

So we, as consumers, who are lucky enough to live in an environment filled with wonders, could do two things. The first one is planning and avoiding doing our shopping at the last minute. The second thing to consider is to bring some human interactions back into business transactions. When dealing with the people at the front line, who get pushed by the organization and its management structure to do things like drones, we should realize that most things are not their fault.

The genuine fault lies in the greed that led companies to extract the slack and weasel out of a promise that we thought they were going to keep.

In his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin teaches us how to adopt a posture of possibility, change the culture, and choose to make a difference. Here are my takeaways from the episode.

In this podcast, Seth discusses the percentages behind our public health events and why we need to interpret the math correctly. There are two crucial questions Seth wanted to dissect.

First, why should we bother with an intervention with a 90% success rate when 99% of the people recover eventually? That is an oversimplification of the 99% recovery rate and projects a false sense of security.

With a population of 300 million in the US, one percent of death from a disease means that approximately three million Americans will die. That is a considerable number, and if any other disease or natural disaster had a death toll number like that, everyone would be paying attention. 99% sounds like an excellent survival rate unless you are one of the 1%.

Another argument says that a vaccine’s 90% efficacy rate is not worth the effort if 99% of the people recover. When we compare two percentages like those, it might feel appropriate, but it is not. When we attempt to compare two percentage numbers, we need to dig deeper into the numbers.

While the 90% efficacy rate seems to be less impressive than the 99% recovery rate, they mean differently because they cover two overlapping but still different segments of the population. If 1% of the population faces a certain doom without the vaccine, the 90% efficacy rate can still make a marked difference. By vaccinating the people, we have an opportunity to save 2.7M (90% out of 3M population) people from certain death.

The second question has to do with why bother getting the second dose of the vaccine if it is only going to increase the efficacy by 15%, from 80% to 95%? Again, we like to do short-cut with the numbers, but that often leads to bias.

In a town of 1,000 people, an 80% efficacy rate means 200 people will get sick. If everyone gets the second vaccination shot and reaches an overall 95% efficacy rate, 50 people will probably get sick. When looking at the number from an individual perspective, the 15% difference rate might not seem like a lot. When we factor in a much larger population, even small percentages start to become significant.

While we may wish we had a perfect answer to our public health crisis right from the start, practicing public health always faces two significant obstacles. First, science does not look good when we look at it in real-time, and science is about failing and stumbling our way to getting it right. The second obstacle is that public health, by its nature, deals with vast numbers of people. Frequently, people who might not be us in any given situation over more extended periods.

It is easy to take public health for granted for those two reasons, but public health is still one of our modern triumphs. Public health has done many good things for a large number of people and deserves our support. We need not take the public health officials and scientists at their word, but the math speaks for itself.

In his Akimbo podcast [https://www.akimbo.link/], Seth Godin teaches us how to adopt a posture of possibility, change the culture, and choose to make a difference. Here are my takeaways from the episode.

In this podcast, Seth discusses the artificial scarcity that our culture has put into creating a perceived value for many things.

Everywhere we look in our modern world, we see the magnification of small differences. These small differences are often some arbitrary standards our society has put into place to create scarcity for something. By successfully creating scarcity for an item, it is easier to justify the value of that item.

Those small differences appear in many places. For example, a few points of difference on test scores might determine whether someone goes to a name-brand college while another equally talented and hard-working student does not get to go. In the world of sports, just a small difference in performance might determine whether some student-athlete gets to go to the professional league. In contrast, another student-athlete does not get drafted by any team.

These small differences also get magnified by our culture. The small differences get magnified via a selection process to demonstrate the scarcity of something and why it deserves a high value. For many physical goods or materials, the supply is not infinite, so scarcity is understandable. We usually place a high value on a physical item that is rare and also useful.

At the same time, our culture also tries to impose high scarcity on things that may not have such constraints. Each year we determine that a limited number of high-school students can be into the university system. We determine that a limited number of student doctors can be certified to become practicing physicians. We place an artificial selection process over these opportunities, and we create a barrier of entry.

By creating a barrier of entry for those opportunities, we are simply making sure that there is scarcity so that people will value it. However, there is a problem with the magnification of small differences, and the problem is we waste human capital or human potential. We waste human capital or potential because the right people might not be matched with the right opportunities. Very often, someone who may be good enough to produce good work in some field may never get a chance to get the training and the nurturing she needs to excel in a field.

Right now, we are on a cultural path that is torn between building more choke points and embracing the long tail. Many of the choke points are artificial, while the long tails downplay scarcity and the perceived value. There is no one obvious answer, but we ought to find more ways to amplify human potential.

How do we find more people who can figure out how to make a living doing something that benefits our community while we strip away all the artificial barriers that keep a barrier of entry in place? We can do that if we figure out how to make the long tail attractive enough to get the right people to embrace it.