Mic Check Vol. #30: Take me home, country roads

...because Southwest left me stranded

Do you have a big presentation coming up? Use Rhetoric. We make it mind-blowingly easy to practice and get feedback from your team.

---

Last week, I got caught up in the Southwest Airlines fiasco and found myself driving cross country for eleven hours to get to a friend’s wedding. All things considered, the drive was pretty easy: I jumped in my car, pulled up Google Maps, and hit the winter roads of Chicago.

This week, I had the chance to chat with Sean Byrnes about startups, breakthroughs, and data storytelling. He dropped a story at the end of the call that had me spinning for the rest of the day:

"Since the advent of cars, paper maps have been the dominant form of navigation. As long as you knew where you were and where you were going, and spent time analyzing the map, you could get anywhere. Sure, you’d deal with traffic and construction and get lost but it was the best we had.”

Paper maps provide an accurate view of all of the various roads and highways that can take you from point A to point B. Business dashboards are no different: they provide an accurate view of all your key metrics, OKRs, trends, and so on.

Sean continues…

“Personally, I haven’t been lost in over 10 years. Why? A transformational technology, GPS, changed navigation forever. Today, all you need to know is your destination and the map systems will find the best route, account for traffic and construction and leave you to focus on driving. Business intelligence is going through a similar change driven by a transformational technology of its own: Artificial Intelligence.”

There will always be a more detailed paper map available. There will also always be an urge to add more metrics to your business dashboard. But, what really matters, is the story we extract and share.

If you don’t already follow Sean, then you absolutely must. He writes an amazing newsletter called The Breaking Point.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

---

📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

Why do we quit? There is perhaps no better way to understand the psychology of quitting than through the lens of children who stop going to music lessons as soon as they have a choice.

How to Build a Life still has a vice grip on my attention. This most recent piece on loneliness and how we’ve learned to mistake it for self-care or productivity is, as usual, a master class in guiding your audience through self-reflection.

Take this one like a vitamin: we don’t need huge teams to accomplish great things. Here’s a list of indisputably epic small teams.