Business Games – Details, episodes & analysis

Talking to Esha of Historic.ly about imperialism, communism, Bernie Sanders, Republicans vs Democrats, AOC, and her first days in & impressions of Russia...

• Esha Substack: Historic.ly | Esha | Substack (historicly.net)
• Esha YouTube: Historic_ly - YouTube
• My joint episode with Esha on H YT channel many months later: TAKEDOWN: Kyiv Independent pro-b&ndera Video with AI - YouTube
• What Do the World Bank and IMF Have to Do with the Ukraine Conflict?
• History of Ukrainian Land from 1000 to 2016 on YouTube

Chay Bowes is an Irish entrepreneur and an independent journalist, and has an MA in Strategy & GeoPolitics. His @BowesChay Twitter slogan is: "Facts should define the Narrative, the Narrative shouldn’t define the facts."

I spoke to him in 2022, after he wrote an article on the Absolute Truth called War Propaganda About Ukraine Starting to Wear Thin and before he wrote An Inevitable War..

His article about the Absolute Truth was recommended and retweeted by none other than John Pilger.

How I Lost Trust in the Western Mainstream Media and What to Do About It.

This is a "voice-over" of the first half of the NY Disinformation article available here: NY Times: Disinformation Central?

Subscribe to our NEWSLETTER here: Business Games

I've done something different this time: instead of reading the script, I went through this article and did a "voice-over" of the first half (the NYT takedown + Summary) for the pod—the timestamps correspond to the parts where I go through these.

• Intro
• The Primary Purpose of This Takedown of NYT [03:14]
• Part 1: The "Russian Disinformation" Campaign [06:00]
• Part 2: 2014 v 2022 Narrative Change [24:48]
• Donbass Defenders from 2014 and Bitterness Towards Kyiv Killing Donbass Civilians
• The NYT Nazi Disappearance Act: "Dangerous Nationalists" From February, 2022 Become "Kremlin Propaganda" by July, 2022
• NYT Guest Writers: From "My Family Members Hated the Neo-Nazis and the US-Backed Kiev Government" to "Euromaidan Uprising Demanding Partnership With the EU"
• Part 3: Verifiable Lies as Exemplified by the "Systemic Rape as a Weapon" Hoax [41:09]
• Part 4: NYT Nepotism and Hit Jobs [56:03]
• Summary [1:00:05]

Hello there, Fellow Learner—and Welcome to!

a Learner's Digest edition of Business Games, an educational series where we help you improve your strategic and critical thinking, make sense of the world and make better decisions under uncertainty.

This is episode "2022 and 11/12-ths".

I wish 2022 were better, but it's not.

Which, in a way, only underscores the importance of strategic thinking, good decision-making under uncertainty, interpreting weak signals, and everything else we've discussed to date on Business Games.

In a minute, there'll be an explanation for my hiatus.

But first, housekeeping…

1. New Pricing
2. Wrapped Up Experimental Season
3. Hiatus Explanation
4. Next Steps

JP Castlin is our first-ever "repeat offender" and in this episode, we preview a conclusion of our Experimental Season. We started with JP in our first interview episode, and it's fitting to discuss with JP what have we learnt, in the final interview of the season.

JP Talks about robustness versus resilience, strategic drift, why it's imperative to experiment on the edges and try and create new revenue streams, how tough it is to manage children using fun objectives and why boundaries are a must, and the very many uses of a Kaufmann screwdriver.

Next week, we'll provide a Season Finale where we wrap everything up and address some of your Questions.

For the FULL episode, subscribe here: www.business-games.ai

• Introduction [00:00]
• On Naturalized Strategy-Making: ABCDE Framework [07:20]
• On Coherent Hypotheses and How to Get Them [11:55]
• On Crisis Management, NZ COVID Response, Moving Through Domains From Chaos to Order, Entrenched Place Dilemma and Brittle Organization and Revenue Stream Substitution, Adaptive Strategies and E-Commerce [15:30]
• More on Adaptive Strategy, Pivots, and E-Commerce [31:52]
• On Predictable Mutations [42:22]
• On Certainty and Uncertainty, Expecting What Could Be, WFH and More on Entrenched Place Dilemma, Resilience, Robustness, and Multiple Revenue Streams With Parallel Safe-to-Fail Experimentation [48:02]
• More on Working From Home, People, Culture, and Employee Representation [53:58]
• On Humanizing Businesspeople and Its Relation to Decision Making [59:09]
• On When Is a Pandemic not a Pandemic, More on Flexible Time and Final on Working From Home [1:07:40]
• On Theory-Informed Practice and Pre-Mortems: How to Put Praxis in "Theory and Praxis" [1:16:27]
• Some on Screwdrivers, More on Robustness versus Resilience, Repeated Betting Over Time, Strategic Drift, and Porsches [1:22:05]
• ABCDE: Aspirations, Boundaries, Coherence, and the Other Two [1:40:47]

• Full transcript on Business Games Premium
• Woolworths launches new 'Basics Box' grocery delivery amid COVID-19 crisis in March 2020 and also a NZ trial version of something similar in April 2020: Covid-19 coronavirus: New World supermarket trialling essential food box sales

Benefits: full transcripts of everything if you want to have notes or prefer reading + deep dives into selected topics.

Subscribe by clicking here: Business Games Premium

20% of the bees in the hive ignore the waggle dance. Why? What do the efficiency-oriented bee accountants say? How do you measure the RoI on the rogue bee activity? How is any of this relevant to innovation? Listen to Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, to get the answers.

Become a Premium Learning Member here: https://www.business-games.ai/about/#/portal

• Introduction [00:00]
• On Measurement, Creativity, and Exploit-Explore Trade-Off
• On That We Don't Know Everything There Is To Know [04:06]
• On the Role of Experimentation in Explore, and Testing Things That Don't Make Sense [08:53]
• Abduction and Innovation: Reasoning Backwards and Business Significance
• On Abductive Reasoning [13:19]
• On Innovation in Start-Ups Versus Established Companies: Stock Markets and Shareholders [18:10]
• On the Benefits of Being a Rogue Bee [23:17]
• On the Necessity of Probabilistic Thinking and Accounting for Search Costs: Creating the "Explore Department" in a Firm [26:25]
• On Statistical Significance Versus Business Significance [39:08]
• On Murders and Detectives: More Backward Reasoning [42:47]
• On How To Innovate Through Mistakes: AI Poetry, Meerkats, Charities and Sex Toys [49:15]
• On Just Reading the Data and More Murders: How To Be a Data Detective [57:33]
• On "Alchemy", Financial Alpha, Comedy, and Those at the Peak of Their Professions [1:04:45]
• On Cryptic Crosswords and More Detective Work [1:09:01]
• On Why Is There Too Much Logic and Not Enough Exploration: You Don't Get Fired for Being Logical [1:11:23]
• On How Innovation and Marketing Works, Habits and Mimetics, and How To Practice Ethical Capitalism [1:17:59]
• On Why Aussies and Kiwis Go To London [1:23:04]
• On Future of Work and Futuristic Cities: Mega- Or Small? On Why Nassim Taleb Advocates for Suburbia. And On Berlin, London, Auckland, Frankfurt… [1:28:03]
• Mini-Summary: Explore-Exploit and Behavioural Science [1:37:25]
• Homework: Books To Read (and Cryptic Crosswords) [1:40:23]
• On Good Tea: TIELKA® [1:47:14]

• Twitter: @rorysutherland
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rorysutherland/
• The wiki man | The SPECTATOR: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-wiki-man
• Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense (book): Amazon.com: Alchemy
• TED Talks: Rory Sutherland | Speaker | TED : https://www.ted.com/speakers/rory_sutherland
• Nudgestock: 

Guesting on Call To Action with Giles Edwards & 1/200 with Kyle Church + what does the 2022 have in store for us?

This would've made a fantastic 1980s SciFi title, wouldn't it?

The absence of flying cars aside, here's what we have for you in the first few months of 2022:

1. Closing off the Experimental Season with the Lit Review episode (maybe 2), another JP Castlin chat, a wrap-up episode, and a mailbag episode
2. Starting the Mental Season, focusing on the embodied mind, mindset, biases, and similar
3. Starting decision-making block courses based on this content

• Learning How to Make Better Strategic Decisions by Maggie S.D. Khoo 美智幸子 Post | LinkedIn
• Call to Action | Gasp | An Independent Creative Agency Berkshire
• 1/200 (1of200.nz)
• "Measurement Is Creativity's Bizarre Half-Sister" (business-games.ai)

Season's greetings and a quick overview of the upcoming 2022 content | Learner's Digest # 7

Welcome to! the Learner's Digest edition of Business Games.

I wanted to share the festive season's greetings and the best wishes for the year's turn!

Now, I'm not going to get all emotional and write or speak with pathos—it's not that kind of show.

However, the year will turn, and with its turning we will get reflective and nostalgic and hopeful.

I'm saving my reflections for the end of the Experimental Season, which will come in January / February 2022.

And just like that… let us cover where we are and what's happening next.

We are about 60% through our Experimental Season.

We've covered an overview with JP, Experimental Economics with Ananish, corporate experimentation with Dawie, board-room and start-up experimentation and predictions with Melissa, SME experimentation with Ashlee.

The private feed contains twice as many episodes, providing deep dives and connective tissue episodes.

What's left is the following:

1. Rory Sutherland discussing experimentation and creativity;
2. A bonus JP episode discussing a sort of a wrap-up where I share with JP what I've learnt through this season and he shares his reflections on complexity;
3. A lit review of the business articles on experimentation;
4. A fuller wrap-up where I provide the reflections on the whole season, and the key takeaways.

Most of these episodes will be on the private feed.

Given that this is a turn of the year and it is a festive season, I'm giving my listeners an option to get a trial month of premium content for free.

All you have to do is:

1. Go to www.business-games.ai and subscribe to the free newsletter.
2. Then, in early January, watch out in your Inbox for an email with the instructions on how to get your trial month.

Note: it's not advertised and is only available to the free newsletter subscribers—so head over to our website and choose the free subscription.

"One of the Biggest Detrimental Habits [for Entrepreneurs Is] a Shiny Object Syndrome"—The Entrepreneurial Marathon With Ashlee Berghoff.

This week, we turn to our final context: SME, lifestyle entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs. Ashlee Berghoff tells us her insights after having swapped a corporate consultancy lifestyle for helping lifestyle entrepreneurs get out of the "messy middle" of the entrepreneurial marathon.

Last interview, we discussed experimentation at the boardroom table and predicting pandemics with Melissa Clark-Reynolds ONZM.

Next interview, we cover creativity and random bees with Rory Sutherland.

• Introduction [00:00]
• On the Entrepreneurial Marathon, Maximizing the Chance of Success, and Dealing with Experimental Failure [06:00]
• On People Resisting Systems, on Enabling Creativity via Systems and Constraints [10:49]
• On Uncertainty [14:28]
• On the Difference Between Solopreneurship and Hiring Employees When It Comes to Risk-taking and Experiments [18:29]
• On How to Involve Your Employees in Experiments [20:47]
• Two Anecdotes on Small Business Experimentation [25:00]
• On the Hero Journey to Be a Guide; On Leadership and Communication [29:42]
• On Process Versus Achievement, Perfectionism Versus Failure, and Dealing with the Messy Middle [36:56]
• The Homework: Long-Form Reading, Writing Things down, and Business Wars [41:47]
• Own Work of Ashlee as It Relates to SMEs and Solopreneurs, the Book, and Systems [52:45]

• Eureka Results (book): https://eurekaresultsbook.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleeberghoff/
• A Squared: https://asquaredonline.com/

• Road Runner Creativity Guardrails Tweet
• Netflix vs Blockbuster | Wondery's Business Wars
• Other links available in the transcript on Business Games Premium

… and a 50% Off Offer | A short connective episode + a call to survey | Learner's Digest # 6

Omicron news +

Where we've been: the Experimental Season to date.

Where we're going: the upcoming few episodes + Xmas.

Fill out this survey and get 50% off on your Year 1 of the annual BG Premium subscription: Business Games Survey: www.business-games.ai/survey/

Subscribe by clicking here: Business Games Premium