🔗 Goldman Sachs Boosts Apple Inc. with Positive App Store Trends

NB: No meaningful (or perhaps even measurable) impact from off-Appstore payments alternatives. Turns out adding friction to a frictionless business is not an attractive option for the customer.

💬 Horace Dediu

‘Ease’ replaces ‘Price’ in my 🖇️ 4 E Model for the Age of Engagement.

I feel I might have shared this in the past - but bears repeating.

🔗 How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old – The Marginalian

Read. Read as much as possible. Read the big stuff, the challenging stuff, the confronting stuff, and read the fun stuff too. Visit galleries and look at paintings, watch movies, listen to music, go to concerts — be a little vampire running around the place sucking up all the art and ideas you can. Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being. Fully understand your enormous value in the scheme of things because the planet needs people like you, smart young creatives full of awe, who can minister to the world with positive, mischievous energy, young people who seek spiritual enrichment and who see hatred and disconnection as the corrosive forces they are. These are manifest indicators of a human being with immense potential.

💬 Nick Cave

AI delivers greater value when it reduces friction, simplifies interaction, and improves workflow efficiency.

💬 Geoffrey Moore

Takaichi walked away from the Feb. 8 vote with a historic landslide, securing a rare two-thirds supermajority in the lower house for her Liberal Democratic Party. The LDP went into the day with 198 seats in the 465-seat chamber and walked out with 316. That’s the largest mandate in Japan’s postwar history, bigger even than any won by Shinzo Abe, Takaichi’s late mentor. The LDP can now override vetoes from the upper house, where it lacks a majority. After cycling through revolving-door prime ministers for years, Japan has elected its most powerful leader since World War II.

💬 Ian Bremmer

A complex system, contrary to what people believe, does not require complicated systems and regulations and intricate policies. The simpler, the better. Complications lead to multiplicative chains of unanticipated effects.

💬 Nassim Nicholas Taleb

You (Should) Say Goodbye - I (Definitely) Say Hello

A short (ish) reminder of the ongoing and necessary shift from old marketing principles that evolved when the vendor was in charge to new principles - which focus on engagement and experience - because the customer is now in charge.

Alright. Your system, your logic.

💬 Claude

Darn Tootin'

💬 Me

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Via John Naughton:

Clarinets, like lawyers, have cases, mouthpieces, and they need a constant supply of hot air in order to function.

💬 Viktor Borge

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The Super Bowl is this weekend, and I really don’t care who wins it, but I’ll watch the game anyway — because that’s what we do, right?

💬 Dan Lewis

Actually no Dan. We don’t.

We make conscious decisions to make our short lives worth something.

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🔗 Coherence Is the New Moat

Another post restructure - and reissue.

Pace Layers - Redux

Climbing the ‘pace layers’ leads to fewer and more specialized sources of information.

Coherence Is The New Moat

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Photo by Andy Newton on Unsplash

And then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened
Ooh, and then it happened

💬 Holland Dozier and Holland (‘H-D-H’ to their friends.)

If you have been following along (and if not - why not?) since the early days of People First, my work in Structured Thought and more recently, the consolidation into PHI⑊PIN then this is for you.

If you haven’t - it is - maybe even more so - still - for you.

Finally. It happened. Sometimes you think that you might just be ‘🔗🎵 blowing in the wind’ - until one day it changes and you think ‘maybe not’.

Today is one such day - because whilst spinning through this morning’s ‘thought review’ - 6 articles caught my eye1 that all connected. With each other, with me and with Structured Thought.

Six Voices. One Message.

Paolo Valdemarin | Laid out the job of what I call an ‘Engagement Platform’ by externalising your operating model so AI can translate between contexts while maintaining a single understanding.

Ben Thompson | Microsoft chose ‘coherence over scale’ by prioritising its own product suite. Why? Because maintaining a coherent vision across a portfolio matters more than maximising any single dimension.

Joan Westenberg | Solo operators using Structured Thought beat out large organisations because coherence compounds while incoherence fragments.

Christopher Lochhead | Execution is automated, knowledge is commoditised and real value has moved ‘upstream’ to problem framing. Which is exactly the point of ‘avoiding solving the wrong problem really well’ as my friend John Caswell has it and indeed, provides a ‘why’ of Structured Thought.

Talking of John - one of his ‘works of art’.

Geoffrey Moore | Agentic AI needs to be deployed atop proven, reliable structures with guardrails built in, not improvised on the fly.

Om Malik | The ‘announcement economy’ is a world of velocity and noise. Coherence matters precisely because everything else is optimised for attention rather than truth. I called it the ‘noise economy’ when I wrote about this last September in a piece called ‘Sound of Silence’.

The Convergence

You might think that these are isolated observations. They are not. Nor are they unique (other than they all appeared in my feed this morning). Bottom line - they are all describing the same shift. A shift that is unspoken - but at the heart of Structured Thought.

Competitive advantage is no longer scale, speed, or even access to AI. It’s coherence - the degree to which every decision, every output, every interaction derives from the same underlying model of reality.

In large organisations, this is nearly impossible. Different departments operate from different mental models and information fragments at every handoff. AI amplifies the disagreement rather than resolving it. But a small team with explicit structure working with a clear operating model, documented constraints, decision rationale, voice guidelines can scale without fragmenting and AI becomes a tool for executing within that coherence, not a way to hope disparate teams accidentally align. This is what structured thought actually means in practice: externalising your logic so thoroughly that it can guide people, process and systems.

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