Living with AI, Disney’s Future, Recession Leadership and More

Hello and happy Sunday!

We've got a bunch of great articles for you this week ranging from a new Superorganizers interview with an AI researcher, to a breakdown of Disney's future under Bob Iger, to an examination of Howard Schultz's Starbucks leadership during the Great Recession.

Let's dive in!

Linus Lee Is Living With AI

Dan Shipper / Superorganizers

If you want a glimpse of what you’ll be doing with generative AI in 10 years, you'll find a lot of it on Linus Lee's laptop.

Linus is an independent AI researcher who's built a suite of custom AI tools that help him learn faster and be more productive. He sat down for a Superorganizers interview to show us all of these tools and more.

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Only the Innovative Survive

Lewis Kallow

In January 2008, Howard Schultz returned to the helm of Starbucks as CEO. The Great Recession was in full swing, and Starbucks was on the brink of insolvency.

But over the next two years, Schultz learned to lead through the recession and righted the ship. By 2010 Starbucks was posting record-breaking profits.

How did he do it? And what lessons can leaders learn about innovating during tough times? Lewis examines in his latest.

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The House of the Bloody Mouse

Evan Armstrong / Napkin Math

At Disney, Bob Chapek is out and Bob Iger is back in.

Iger is famous for bringing Disney back to dominance during his original tenure by successfully acquiring and integrating Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, and more. But times have changed. The changing landscape of media and Disney's already massive size means Iger can't just acquire his way to success.

Can he execute a different playbook?

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My Philosophy of Product Building (Part II)

How do you get from idea to a great MVP of your product?

Nathan continues his series on product building this week, and covers three important new topics:

• Shaping an idea into an initial v1
• Why you should look at programming as a means to an end
• Why programming and design should be tightly coupled

If you want to build your own products this is the series for you.

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How to Become Comfortable With Uncertainty

We all get caught up in fixed ideas and opinions. But not being able to see alternatives creates bad decisions and broken relationships.

How can we avoid this trap? Michael argues in this essay that we need to learn to get comfortable sitting in uncertainty—and he provides a roadmap for exactly how to do that.

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🎧 Fostering High Performance Teams | Episode 14 

Kristen Harbacht, Nikita Miller, and Stella Garber / Cross-Functional and Friendly

So you’ve made those crucial first hires, built the right team, and set clear goals. The next step is vital: managing performance.

If the sales team isn’t performing, should the product team be held accountable? Great products sell themselves right? Or is it marketing’s fault for not positioning the product correctly? Or, maybe, they’re actually doing fine, but the sales lead you hired isn’t that great after all.

Evaluating whether your teams have reached their goals is deceptively simple in theory, but increasingly complicated when you have to do it across functions.

Tune in as the Nikita, Stella, and Kristen pair actionable advice with their own experiences over the years! 

Listen

🤖 AI Tools You Might Like

New day, new cool AI tool to try. We're fascinated by how quickly AI is moving, and we want to make sure you're updated on it. 

So we invited Ben Tossell of the daily AI newsletter Ben's Bites to share AI tools you may not have heard of:

• ChatGPT—Allows you to interact with GPT3 in a conversational way. Everyone’s talking about it, and rightly so! (announcement link) I wrote a (viral) twitter thread on many use cases here.
• Modal Podcast Transcriber—Transcribe any podcast episode in just 1-2 minutes. This tool is pretty incredible. It does what it says on the cover! (link)
• Storywizard—Create incredible children’s stories in no time using AI. (link)
• Postwise—Write, schedule and grow with this AI Twitter tool. (link)
• The Gist—Summarise any Slack channel or thread in one click. (link)
• Hello—the search engine for instant answers. Like ChatGPT but connected to the internet. (link)