Grab bag (Week 17/2025)
Tradeoffs; Bangkok, Marseille, hype, and legibility; billionaire group chats and Japanese cooking in the 1980s; code. Dogs.
Hello friends,
Got back from Bangkok on Monday night after a delayed flight, and have lurched right into catching up on a slew of things I let slide all last week.
Writing
All strategy begins with setting goals. All conventional goal-setting focuses only on setting shared goals — and glides right over any discussion about which desirable outcomes each unit is willing to sacrifice to achieve their shared goals. Part 4 of my series on strategy misconceptions is about how conventional strategy that only focuses on goals is fundamentally flawed, and why talking about tradeoffs is a crucial (but often overlooked) part of making strategy.
👉 Read about why strategy must be about tradeoffs, not just goals.
Bangkok reminded me that some productive discomfort and structured mess creates a city that takes effort — and that a city that demands effort, attention, and active sensemaking is better than one you can navigate on autopilot. Bangkok feels like Marseille in this regard, but with an abundance of significantly better prepared foods. I hope to go back soon.
👉 Read some loosely connected Bangkok observations.
👉 Read about time, hype, and legibility in Marseille
Elsewhere
Decades ago, I tried to find out how, in just two years (1979-1981), the American food intelligentsia went from seeing Japanese cooking as ethnic food to seeing it as a refined tradition comparable to French haute cuisine. Turns out there was a tight community of food industry influencers even then (they talked on the phone and wrote letters). The story of how a Japanese cooking school owner managed to incept the idea of a fine Japanese culinary tradition into this influencer community is one which I have tried to sell to publishers for over 15 years, with predictable lack of success — even when framed as a case study in using hidden, high-leverage influence networks to create rapid change. At least one strand of the contemporary version of these high-leverage networks appears to consist of billionaire group chats.
👉 Read about the group chats that changed America.
👉 Read about how old-skool influencers made Japanese cooking into American fine dining.
A very active group chat I’m in (as far as I know, mostly not billionaires) is filled with AI techno-optimists who oscillate between gushing over using AI tools to code and wailing at the bugginess and inelegance of the code AI tools produce. Now is a good time to remember that code is a sociotechnical representation of ideas and intentions, and that even the best tools are not substitutes for ideas and intentions.
👉 Read this magnificent answer to the question “What is code?”
See you next week,
VT