Value creation, innovative business models, and non-traditional marketing.

November 6, 2026

You get about 3 minutes of focus before something breaks it. Nearly half the time, that something is you.

Picture a founder on a Tuesday. She opens a pricing proposal. Four minutes later she checks Slack, though nobody asked her to. Then email, then a competitor's website. An hour later the proposal is still open, and she's sure her team keeps interrupting her. Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, shadowed 36 managers, analysts, developers, engineers and project leaders for 3 days. On average, people worked 3 minutes and 5 seconds before they switched tasks or something interrupted them. About 44% of the interruptions came from the workers themselves. Nobody pinged them. After an interruption, people took an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task, with about 2 other tasks in between. They did go back to about 82% of that work the same day. The damage is the delay, repeated across roughly 12 streams of work a day. Sophie Leroy calls the leftover piece attention residue. When you leave a task unfinished, part of your attention stays with it, which leaves less for the next task, and the effect grows when the work is demanding. Here are 3 things to try for a week. They're suggestions, not research findings: 1. Close email and chat during your most important task, and check them at set times instead. 2. Before you switch to anything else, write one line about where you stopped and what comes next. 3. Tally every time you reach for your phone or open a new tab with no ping prompting you. Write the count down each evening and compare days. What's the first thing you check when work gets hard? Be honest.

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November 5, 2026

Xerox invited Steve Jobs in on purpose, and it wanted Apple stock in return.

The legend says he stole the Mac from a lab. The receipt says a $1 million deal. Xerox Development Corporation invested $1 million in Apple and got the right to buy 100,000 shares before the IPO. Part of the arrangement was a reciprocal look at Xerox's research lab, PARC, which began building the Alto in 1972. In December 1979, Jobs, Jef Raskin and several engineers sat through 2 sessions on the Alto: a bitmap screen, a mouse, overlapping windows, all running Smalltalk. PARC also showed them a networking demo. Jobs said, "I thought it was the best thing I'd ever seen in my life." He was visibly excited and interrupted the demo repeatedly. Then Apple built the rest, and the rest was a lot. The Alto's mouse had 3 buttons. The Mac's had 1. Apple moved the menu bar to the top of the screen, added a trash can and wrote its own rules for clicks, dialogs and alerts. Larry Tesler, who came over from PARC, and Bill Atkinson were among the Apple designers behind it. The Mac shipped in 1984. Xerox sued in 1989. The court ruled that Xerox filed too late, and that the elements it claimed weren't protectable. PARC researcher Alan Kay said of the Mac: "The Mac is the first personal computer good enough to be worth criticizing." Jobs put it this way: Apple and Microsoft both took an idea from Xerox, not an implementation. "Stole" is the wrong word. Xerox had the idea and Apple had the product, and the product is the harder part. A clever demo in a lab doesn't get you a computer that a stranger can use on day one. Where do you draw the line between borrowing an idea and stealing one?

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November 4, 2026

Stop calling your coworker Dunning-Kruger.

The idea started with a man who put lemon juice on his face and robbed 2 banks. He was sure it made him invisible to security cameras. His name was McArthur Wheeler, and the year was 1995. The footage aired on the evening news, tips came in, and police arrested him. He reportedly protested, "But I wore the lemon juice!" Psychologist David Dunning and his graduate student Justin Kruger read about the case, and it inspired their research. In 1999 they tested Cornell undergraduates on humor, logic and grammar. The students who landed in the bottom quartile scored around the 12th percentile. They guessed they were around the 62nd. Many of us remember the lesson as "stupid people think they're smart." That's not what the paper says. Its claim is narrower: people who lack skill at a task also lack the skill to judge how they're doing at it. The top scorers made the opposite mistake: they underrated themselves, because they assumed others knew as much as they did. Then the pushback came. In 2022, Magnus and Peresetsky analyzed 665 students and called the effect a statistical artifact. Dunning points to a 2017 study that sorted students by earlier grades instead of the same test, and says the pattern held. The fight is over why it happens, not whether it does. Picture the meeting. Someone loses an argument, and out comes "classic Dunning-Kruger." Here's my take: Dunning-Kruger has become the polite way to call someone an idiot in a meeting or a comment section. Scientists are still arguing about the cause. Use it on a coworker and you're winning an argument with a contested explanation, not diagnosing anything. Which smart-sounding term gets misused most where you work?

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