Minimum Viable Beauty Shot
Thank you for reading our weekly Beauty Shot. We have received very positive feedback on recent issues, but we also know it can be a lot of content to sift through, prompting responses such as “I wish I had time to read all this.”
With this issue we are attempting to be more economical and thus: the Minimum Viable Beauty Shot.
Much has been made of the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), the smallest possible version of a product to create maximum value for users. The quintessential one is Twitter. It began as an SMS-based platform, and its original 140-character format simply reflected limits imposed by mobile carriers. You could argue that to date Twitter hasn’t moved beyond MVP status. It is a prime example of the power of constraints.
That said, the MVP concept has limitations: while it may be interesting to explore a “wedding MVP,” it may be less fruitful to settle on a “marriage MVP.” Generally speaking, when it comes to relationships, we are maximalists, not essentialists.
This brings us back to beautiful business, as in, relationships that not only make money but also meaning. Strategist Jon H. Pittnam bemoans a “tyranny” of MVP thinking in product and service development: an over-emphasis on features and functions (“classic quality”) and not enough emphasis on the whole and its context (“romantic quality”).
True to our mission, this Beauty Shot aims to deliver both. It will take 15 undistracted minutes to read it.
—Tim Leberecht
Questions
Convenience or love?
Growth or impact?
Culture or strategy?
Make or buy?
Lead or follow?
Price or experience?
More or less?
Lessons (un)learned?
Vanity metrics?
Does it spark joy?
Do you love it?
What would you sacrifice for it?
Tomorrow or never?
Why?
Why not?
Or just cut to the chase:
Worth it?
Products
One woman’s bucket list of the world’s great dollhouses.
“Big glitter begets smaller glitter; smaller glitter gets everywhere, all glitter is impossible to remove.” The New York Times asks, “What Is Glitter?”
“Measuring in at just 100cm tall—and 99cm wide—the Peel P50 is the world’s smallest car to ever go into production. The three-wheeled microcar was originally made from 1962 to 1965.”
The Apple 12 Mini isn’t selling. Perhaps it needs to be smaller, like the Jelly 2.
Work
“Microworkers” make your digital life possible.
It hasn’t received much attention lately, but Mechanical Turk is still around. “Turker” Sherry Stanley says among the microwork tasks she completes—varying daily, with varying pay—are image-tagging to train AI and helping Amazon’s Alexa understand regional dialects.
Productivity
Professor Brendan Burchell at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School has researched the ideal “employment dosage” and proposes one day of paid work a week.
A Brooklyn drug dealer estimates that 10-15% of their clients plan on microdosing for productivity.
Management
Jeff Bezos is an “infamous micromanager.”
Underlying micromanagement is fear of failure, writes Muriel Maignan Wilkins in the Harvard Business Review.
“It is better to have a micromanager who knows the job his team is doing than a macro manager who delegates without knowing what it takes to get a certain task done.”—Nina Angelovska, in praise of the micromanager.
Daily stand-ups (a.k.a. as scrums or huddles) instead of two-hour town halls: “We stand up to keep the meeting short. That’s it.” More (or less).
More than 90% of employees would prefer their manager to address mistakes and learning opportunities in real-time. That was before COVID, and annual or quarterly performance reviews seem even more inert now. The alternative? Continuous micro-feedback on-the-go.
Brand
Checking your likes? Instagram offers to remove them entirely.
Google changes one part of their cookie policy, and publishers are left stranded.
Netflix Korea broke a Guinness World Record with the smallest ad: 1.712 cm by 2.429 cm for the Busted show finale.
Brands reported to have minimal marketing budgets: Sriracha, Supreme, Trader Joe’s, Zara.
1000 True Fans? Li Jin of Andreessen Horowitz suggests you only need 100.
Finance
Barcelona-based Enzo Ventures is investing in pre-seed, pre-revenue companies to the tune of €10,000 to €25,000 each. It’s another sign that microfunds are gaining traction.
What happened to the idea that micropayments (for news and other content) would save us from an ad-based internet? Twitch users can buy “Bits,” which are like a money-bearing clap you can use to tip streamers whose work you’re enjoying. $1.40 buys 100 of these Bits. Twitch takes 20-40%, depending on the amount tipped.
Degrowth
Strategy
“I don’t have time for people who scale.”—Jonathan Cook
There is dignity in building a business that has no intention of becoming a unicorn.
“The marriage researcher John M. Gottman says the secret of a healthy relationship is not a great purpose or a lofty promise, but small moments of attachment. In other words, intimacy. What does this mean in the workplace?” Tim Leberecht on embracing intimacy, one other at a time.
Take 18 minutes to learn about Company of One: Why Staying Small is the Next Big Thing for Business by Paul Jarvis: “A refreshing approach to entrepreneurship centered on staying small—and avoiding growth maximizing happiness, sustainability and profitability.”
“Ample research suggests that better-performing virtual teams have under a dozen people.” This plus other insights on how to make large-scale corporations feel less imposing can be found in the Playbook co-written during our The Great Wave festival. (You can skip ahead to the “Intimacy” section.)
True business success
Means hiring good people
Much smarter than you
—Spider Graham finds the Zen of business through haiku.
Craft
“Sometimes a flat-footed sentence is what serves, so you don’t get all writerly: ‘He opened the door.’ There, it’s open.”—Amy Hempel
“Good design is as little design as possible.” One of Dieter Rams’s 10 design principles.
“One chord is fine. Two chords is pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.”—Lou Reed
The shortest book to hit number-one on The New York Times Best Sellers list is Harry Frankfurt’s 80-page On Bullshit.
Nature
Microbes in your gut might help battle COVID-19.
Living fossils? Microbes that feed off chemical reactions triggered by radioactivity, may tell us a lot about the history of life on Earth.
Blood signals help test for early Alzheimer’s disease.
Nanoparticles might help restore the brain.
Aquatic eelgrass seeds, a.k.a. sea rice, could change the food system.
Nanobots could deliver drugs to tissues or organs.
The size of raindrops is governed by the strength of a planet’s gravitational pull. The stronger the gravity, the smaller the raindrop.
Oy vey.
An app to listen to the micro-sounds of insects
Micro-ear lets scientists eavesdrop on the micro-world.
Tiny ear listens to hidden worlds.
Waste
“There comes a moment in the evolution of almost any socio-technical ecosystem where a significant proportion of people realize that [waste management] strategies aren’t enough, and that the waste stream can’t simply be managed—it needs to be reduced…. We’re about to hit such a moment for digital waste.” The always-interesting Noēma magazine takes a look at how we might get serious about digital waste reduction.
Art
Bis Gleich is a short film about watching the world from your window, and then a small act of kindness when you can’t get out of bed to go to your window anymore.
Every two months, The One Minutes releases a batch of one-minute videos. The series for this March/April is “Comfort and Vision,” and the selected videos hail from Brazil, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the UK.
If Anything Happens, I Love You. 12 minutes.
Love
“You’ll understand someday”—miniature love stories under 100 words.
Music
Rodrigo Gonzalez Pahlen, one of our Musicians in Residence, is a virtuoso who makes big music with one of the smallest instruments, the harmonica.
Tiny Desk concerts
Sofar Sounds and home concerts
The House Spotify playlist
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