Product Design
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate Cooper
3y ago
Nate and Eve recently sat down with Swarm's Product Design Manager Claire Harr on The Cut Your Learning Curve Podcast. Before transitioning into product design and product management, Claire worked in the related realms of visual design, research, marketing, and business development. Throughout her career, she has worked with companies of all sizes — and has worked as a designer in an agency setting, as a freelancer, as a business owner, and in-house. Prior to joining SWARM, Claire led the in-house marketing team at construction management company Turner International in their N ..read more
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The glamour and reality of freelancing
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate Cooper
3y ago
While the term “freelance” has been in use since the 1800s, it was the development of the Internet that enabled the rapidly growing freelance marketplaces that we have today. Now freelancers are available from around the world; they generally work on a set of tasks for an organization on a short term basis.  As freelancing continues to play a bigger and bigger role in the workforce, what are the ups and downs of this type of work? In this week’s podcast, Nate and I discuss the glamour and reality of freelance work across different industries. We talk about the appeal of being your ow ..read more
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Companies of the future
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate
3y ago
In this week’s podcast, Nate and I discuss our thoughts on the new normal. Given the market landscape of 2021, what are the conditions for small companies to grow and thrive? The relentless onward march of technology and globalization continues to impact small business. Companies of all sizes can access a more global pool of talent and potential customers. More industries are open to market disruption by small players. At the same time, with the amount of information on the Internet increasing exponentially by the day, a big challenge for small businesses is connecting with their audiences and ..read more
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How does resilience affect the workforce?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate Cooper
3y ago
After touching on different areas of worklife throughout this season of podcasts, Nate and Eve today are looking at resilience. In this week’s podcast, they first talk about the idea of resilience as “the ability to recover from difficult experiences (and simply the unknown), to adapt, and sometimes to even experience growth.” Throughout history, people’s ability to respond and recover from hard moments has been hugely influential in their overcoming obstacles and achieving success.  Today clearly the workplace is shifting - from in person to remote. From regional to global. From long ter ..read more
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Management and Leadership: Are They Different?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Eve MacKnight
3y ago
As massive change occurs in the workplace, so too have the concepts of “leadership” and “management” continued to evolve to adapt to the modern day.  Leadership is commonly understood as the big broad strokes that paint the vision of the organization, while management is responsible for executing this vision in the day-to-day. As my former CEO described to me, the leader announces “there’s the hill we must climb,” and the managers figure out how to get there and ascend to new heights. All of this has implications in the field of education. A company like Nokia is a cautionary tale of how ..read more
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When we hire, what's most important to us as employers? What are we looking for?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate Cooper & Eve MacKnight
3y ago
In the past year, the spread of Covid-19 has dramatically upended both work and college life.  Much of the “knowledge economy” workforce has migrated to 100% remote. We had almost 2 feet of snow fall on New York City in the past week. Instead of delayed commutes and trundling through the slush, our work days were basically unchanged. So too have universities shifted to a mix of remote and in-person classes, with each school and school system designing its own policies for testing and reducing transmission.  As the vaccine rollout continues and tentative plans are being made for the r ..read more
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What is a hackathon and how does it provide a model, whether positive or negative, for the future of work?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate Cooper
3y ago
In the Industrial Age of the19th and 20th century, the assembly line came to dominate manufacturing. The building of everything from ships to shoes was split among a line of workers, each completing a set of distinct tasks that were repeated, in order, all day long.  The rise of the Information Age, and the nature of how software is developed, demanded a different approach.  Hackathons, which were first developed around the year 2000, realize this new way of working. A group of coders, designers and marketers are sequestered in some kind of space, away from the distractions of daily ..read more
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Life inside a tech start-up: What is different about working inside of a technology startup vs another organization?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate and Eve
3y ago
If companies of the twentieth century looked to Ford, General Electric and IBM as the gold standard for organizational performance, companies today model themselves in the image of Apple or Facebook - innovative, nimble and incredibly successful. Both Apple and Facebook share an origin story of small beginnings: of a few young men gathering in a garage or a dorm room to create The Next Big Thing. While the unicorns (tech firms valued over $1 billion) earn the most attention and headlines, the majority of tech start-ups are still in the “small and growing” stage. In this episode we dive into ou ..read more
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What is the value of expertise?
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate and Eve
3y ago
Today more and more people are asking “what does it mean to be an expert?”   The disruptive technologies and the new careers to support them are being created far faster than regulations, education programs and any state or federal certifications. Today there are more state testing requirements to be a hairdresser than for an engineer building software for a large phone provider or major bank. Another common yardstick for expertise, “years of experience” simply is a poor fit in a digital landscape where the products themselves are only five years old or less.  At the same time ..read more
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To Zoom or not to Zoom
Cut Your Learning Curve
by Nate @ Swarm
3y ago
In the past year, Covid has radically upended offices in the USA. Co-working spaces, open offices and company cafeterias emptied out as office work swiftly moved online.  Some of the benefits became clear - reduced commuting time and a relatively small drop in productivity. The challenges have also been equally well-documented, from news articles to memes on Twitter: squirming kids and pets in the workspace, seeing faces only on a screen, and never really turning off.  ..read more
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