Antonym Lede Edition
Antonym Lede Edition
Five minutes to read enough to know where it's buried...
Image: The Da Vinci iPhone (antonym+midjourney)
Dear Reader
For the record, are you or have you ever been a lizard?
There is a mantra in newsrooms about not taking too much time getting to the point of a story: “Don’t bury the lede”. As in, don’t spend precious words explaining the proceedings of a court case prosecuting a pick pocket before you reveal that the plaintiff was dressed as a llama when they carried it out. (Lede is probably an intentional alternate spelling of “lead”—so no one thinks you’re advising reporters to hide toxic base metals shallow graves.)
With some stories though finding the lede can be a challenge because there are too many potential headlines. Take the case of Alex Jones, a popular US conspiracy theorist. He is being sued by the parents of a school massacre he claimed was faked by sinister forces, including the US government as a pretext to tighten gun control.
[a juror] asked multiple questions about whether Jones would still be able to fight “the globalists” if he resolved the Sandy Hook issue. “Will you state under oath that you are not a lizard person who works for the globalists?” was one rejected juror question.
So at this trial, in a jury presumably vetted by both sides’ legal teams, is someone who may believe in the lies that Jones has spread. Deep in the tempest of crazy that is the post-truth alternate reality, details like this show how deep and wide the damage of disinformation.
Jones has not yet had a chance to confirm under oath that he is not a lizard.
Are you a lizard, tho?
In case the Alex Jones case has worried you that you may be a lizard person, here’s a handy self-diagnosis. (It’s not 100% accurate, so if you are worried you are a lizard person, please do consult your doctor (or to save the NHS money and keep your liberty, bury the idea deep in your mind and never speak of it again to anyone).
If you answer “yes” to any of these, congratulations and welcome to the global elite:
Do you have any patches of skin that could be described as scaly?
Do you fall asleep or start preparing for hibernation if your body temperature falls below 37ºC?
Have you ever shed your entire skin in one go?
Have you ever regrown your tail? (Trick question: No also means you may be a lizard. You have a tail.)
Image: A lizard person on trial. (Antonym x Midjourney).
Quote of the week
Early is the same as wrong, as they say in Silicon Valley.
> In 2004, a small group of engineers, designers, and marketers pitched Jobs on turning their hit product, the iPod, into a phone. “Why the f@*& would we want to do that?” Jobs snapped. “That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.”
— Adam Grant, Think Again
Image: Knights on a tapestry with iPhones. (Antonym x Midjourney)
WORD OF THE WEEK: KILL CHAIN
This week’s word of the week is one of those odd neologisms churned up by military operations:
Kill chain
A kill chain is a series of steps that lead to somebody—or somebodies—ceasing to live. It’s a phrase where bureaucracy meets extreme violence, where several systems intersect.
Wikipedia has it as:
[...] a military concept which identifies the structure of an attack. It consists of:
identification of target
dispatching of forces to target
initiation of attack on target
destruction of target
The phrase was in a Twitter thread about Russian weapons systems from Jack Watling, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a UK defence think tank. Russian forces in Ukraine have been missing their targets so often that some have questioned whether their equipment is out of date or ineffective.
In 25 tweets, Watling explains how Russian weapons systems are not necessarily defective or not working well, but that the systems of people and information that support using them are often very weak.
Most of us likely think of military hardware operating like any other piece of technology. You do X you get result Y: press the button and the missile launches and hits the target. But they are often far more complex than that, especially those from the former Soviet bloc. You need specialist teams that can coax the machine into behaving as they want it to and fast decision-making based on accurate intelligence.
Watling’s account reminds me of working in an organisation with an old accounting system — it’s fine until you need to do something new, and then you find that there’s one venerable old team hidden somewhere in the building who know the trick of getting the system to accept a novel instruction, like issuing an amended invoice, or accepting an estimate in Korean Won. Once you’ve found the people who know how to do a workaround, you suddenly realise how valuable they are—and wonder with a shudder what would happen if they ever left: Nn one would be able to make anything work properly. Monthly reports would be nonsense. Random suppliers would go without payment.
Now imagines the equivalent of that but on a battlefield, where many of the old experts have been killed. Where the maps turn out to be thirty years out of date.
Watling says:
“Often [the Russian military] are 48 hours late striking a target because of how inefficient their kill chains are. In Chernobyl it was noted that their soldiers were using maps from before the disaster…
SCIENTIFIC LANDMARK OF THE WEEK
The FT explained the latest AI-driven breakthrough that will have huge implications for medicine:
Artificial intelligence has surpassed the limits of scientific knowledge by predicting the shape of almost every known protein, a breakthrough that will significantly reduce the time required to make biological discoveries.
The research was done by London-based AI company DeepMind — owned by Google parent Alphabet — which used its AlphaFold algorithm to build the most complete and accurate database yet of the more than 200mn known proteins.
This week I’ve been…
Writing about chaos (and purpose, chaotically)
After The CMO’s Dilemma I’m writing a series of four articles expanding on the elements of Brilliant Noise’s marketing transformation service:
The ability to change is a competitive advantage
Mapping opportunities (set the course)
The test-learn-scale method in the BN Marketing Transformation™ process.
Scaling success and sharing knowledge.
An article this week about Jim Collins (shared by Caroline Webb on LinkedIn) gave me a serendipitous reminder of his insights about dealing with complexity and the imperative to change and keep changing. A highly recommended read, for insights like this one:
> It’s the return on the luck that separates, not the luck itself. But there’s one really key caveat, and this is something people have to grasp about luck. For building a great company, luck is not a causal variable. Good luck never, ever causes a great company. Bad luck, if it’s big enough, can kill a company. That’s why you have to manage yourself such that you can absorb tremendous hits of bad luck, so you never hit the death line.
If you’ve not read Collins before, here’s a page with summaries of his key concepts, like “The Flywheel” and “Bullets then Cannonballs”.
Reading about editing
This week I briefly lost myself in a wonderful non-fiction book about editing and publishing (thank you to Orla for the thoughtful present) How Words Get Good, by Rebecca Lee.
Final words of the week
Containing no spoilers, the last sentence of the second of the Cromwell trilogy by Hilary Mantel is
The word ‘however’ is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.
— Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies
I can’t think of a smarter way to end the letter than that, so thanks for reading and see you next week.
Antony