
Photo by Spencer Lowell for The New York Times
This month has unfortunately been overshadowed by the passing our my former colleague John, fellow crowdsourcing researcher who worked on the theory of Crowd Capital, and with whom we have explored the geography of Crowd Capital. He was a funny, smart and inspiring individual; may he rest in peace… I’m also sharing a dozen of articles that I found worthwile reading, starting with this fabulous NYT piece about KitKat in Japan.
It’s been 3 months since my latest monthly blog post… 👼 Here are 9 articles I found most interesting in that time: some articles about working on website user experience, others more generally about marketing, entrepreneurship or strategy.
In July, we became FIFA World Champions and the Tour de France has provided us with 3 great, entertaining weeks of racing. In this post I share my 5 favorites articles of the month: why Wish sponsors the LA Lakers, how Dribble’s product team works, where Belgian striker Romelu Lukaku comes from, when Airbnb adopted storyboards and what “vaporware horseshit” product Zoox’s team is working on. 
In October, product strategy meets finance and marketing. One of the articles is about the perilous idea of prompting people to walk, especially when it comes to colored pastry comparisons. The last link is about Nike’s design process, more precisely an interview of the apparel brand’s chief design officer, who “doodles all day” while still managing to impart a creative direction to 1,000+ people across the organization. While I did read and enjoy all of this in the last month, I hand it over to you, and spend some time somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.
Harbin is a small city (10 million inhabitants…) in North-East China, just above North Korea. What is worthwhile about Harbin is neither its size nor its situation, but its brandnew Opera House. Below I share a video from an ArchDaily journalist visiting this incredible building, designed in China, for China. Also shared: an interview of Facebook’s HR head, an article about the network’s innovation benchmarks, a beautiful Gillette-ad & more.