FOUR WORDS AND FIVE LINES
Four words for how a speech should feel — brevity, levity, charity, clarity — and five lines for how to build one: outline, headline, frontline, sideline, bottom line. That is the whole framework, and it fits on a napkin. Best of luck with the next speech you give.
A RARE LOL
Donald Rumsfeld wrote about building his first app at 83. Read the top comment.
A BOX OF AGILE
A round-up of the stationery I keep buying for professional work: sticky notes, markers, pens, notebooks, wall Post-its, and something to keep it all in. No good technology team gets far without them. There is also a Trello board that turns the whole idea into a very small business, which I did not build, for reasons the business model makes obvious.
GOV.UK WINS DESIGN OF THE YEAR!
For several months I worked on GOV.UK — the Inside Government team, on new product development and content transition — and then it won Design of the Year 2013. The award was not the striking part. The striking part was a government writing its policy on contentious subjects in language an ordinary person could actually read. That practice did not outlast the administration.
WATCH THEM GROW
I spent 48 hours in a room with 200 people trying to build a company from scratch. We didn’t win. The team built watchthemgrow.net anyway — four people who hadn’t met each other two days earlier. Five things I took away that I still think about.