Nathanael Yellis

When starting a consulting call these days, the first thing everyone discusses is how COVID-19 and its self-quarantine impacts our lives. But, aside from now working from home, the COVID-19 quarantine doesn’t disrupt my life all that much.

Why? I live a calm lifestyle, constructed from simple, repeating patterns. With work and home, parenting and hobbies, my life alternates work and rest. It’s a life to be lived consistently for decades. The kind from which you don’t need a vacation. It’s a calm life: valuing simplicity over complexity, time over speed, limits over stimuli.

Image: Phil Roeder

Jonah Goldberg has a great podcast. It’s a great reflection of the traditionally conservative but Trump-skeptical. He’s a center-right pundit who’s maintained some sense of true north and a modicum of straight talk amidst the recent turbulence. That’s rare. Now he’s launching, along with two partners, a media company called The Dispatch.

A friend wrote:

I’m neck-deep in planning for a migration to Salesforce, which has exposed some fascinating differences in philosophy. Salesforce is, in principle, infinitely customizable, which leads to this dispute: leaving intact the system’s core data structure (based on B2B), or gutting Salesforce’s data structure to power the simplicity of future usage.

How should you approach structuring a new Salesforce instance? If, for example, your company doesn’t think in terms of leads, opportunities, and accounts, would you use those as the default objects or would you use something custom? On the one hand, a custom CRM architecture feels both simpler and better, but on the other hand you’d end up losing a fair amount of any CRM’s interoperability, extensability, and, likely, outside expertise.

From the beginning, I’ve been impressed with Michael Marinaccio’s work. The latest chapter in his writing promises to be the best yet. People Over Product puts technology in its proper context.

Acton taught me how to be an entrepreneur: in the classroom I learned to make the critical decisions required to lead my own company.

Rejecting conventional wisdom to leave vendors out could result in operational leverage and a competitive edge.

As I prepare for a short trip to DC this weekend, I culled a few essays on cities, how we govern them, what we find in them, and how we grow them. There’s something really cool about DC or Boston or New York. Just below the surface lie intractable challenges. From expensive housing to expensive infrastructure to expensive salads, cities are expensive. Many are left behind by soaring costs. In the articles below, you’ll see liberals, capitalists, environmentalists, and rich people all blamed for the problems of cities. Most of this is probably wrong, but some good ideas start out with a wrong idea. Enjoy the reading and enjoy your city!