Insights

We assume that research and the expertise that flows from research is all information. Information is most often a good or a service.

Increasingly, however, goods and services are not enough. The world wants experiences and transformations — the “experience economy,” in the rubric of management advisor Joe Pine.…

All marketing and communication tells stories — if not to its audiences, then certainly to its clients about its successes and failures.

The question isn’t whether you’ll tell a story to your clients (or to yourself), but what kind of story.…

Michael Eisen, the EiC of eLife, challenged Twitter to do just that in a long thread over the weekend. His alternative: publish research papers in preprint on free-access servers such as arXiv or bioRxiv, and (as Eisen puts it) “then review and curate these works in many different ways, throughout the useful lifetime of the paper.”

Under Eisen, eLife is taking steps to institute this paradigm itself (yes, the irony of a journal working to put itself out of business), Here’s the beginning of Eisen’s thread (I encourage you to read the whole thing, which has gotten lots of feedback, mostly very positive):

This follows an interesting paper out in June in PLoS Biology by Eisen and two other authors, recommending grantees mandate that preprints of all research they fund be posted to free-access servers such as arXiv and bioRxiv.…

A colleague remarks he’s using cannabis to help himself sleep better. I send him a new study that says, no, in fact, people who use cannabis to sleep better actually report feeling more tired the next day than when they don’t use it.…

If you’re promoting research, you must reckon with the law of shitty clickthroughs.

The law of shitty clickthroughs, as defined by Andrew Chen at Andreessen Horowitz: “Over time, all marketing strategies result in shitty clickthrough rates.”

“Marketing strategies” for Chen = Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, banner ads, e-books…any channel or format we use to promote our expertise, ideas and work.…

If you’re a research communicator or marketer, that’s a fundamental question you should be asking about project you take on. Why? Because your shop is superlean and you almost certainly have to do both marketing and services. And being clear about which you’re doing — and why you’re doing it, and how much of each you should be doing to be effective at bot — can mean the difference between making a difference and just treading water, for yourself and your organization.…

Economist Caroline Webb begins her 2016 book How to Have a Good Day not as every other big-idea book from the last two decades has begun (with an arresting anecdote, designed to become the lead of every review or interview about the book).…

Six weeks ago my mother was lying in a hospital bed, weakened by an abdominal infection that had days earlier threatened to go septic and had only receded the night before I flew in to see her.

This hospital visit was her second of the past month — the first had been for emergency surgery to repair a perforated duodenal ulcer that had also dumped two liters of bacteria-rich gastric juice into her abdominal cavity, elevating her infection risk.…

“Most people, even the productive, have a day that is at least forty percent slack” says the economist, professor, blogger, podcaster, tweeter, book author, research center director and Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cowen. 

And you’re telling me you can’t do thought leadership?…