No spoilers as long as you don’t click on links

I’m a fan of Jaqen H’ghar. The very minor character who was featured primarily in season 2 of Game of Thrones, I feel had a disproportionate impact on Arya Stark and I’m delighted to see that at the end of of Season 5 there could be further exploration of this complex and compelling character.

During my recent vacation, I realized that I wanted to re-watch all scenes involving Jaqen and Arya and the process wasn’t incredibly hard. Fire up the Game of Thrones wiki, find his page, and then map references to episodes. Using that as a script, I fire up iTunes and scrub episodes to watch these selected scenes. Voilà.

This experience revealed something interesting about the show to me. While there are certainly dependencies which tie the different plots together, the different narratives, I believe, can stand on their own. Imagine just a cut of Games of Thrones that contain scenes involving Theon Greyjoy – would that be good TV?

The point: I would pay good money for a recut Game of Thrones where I could choose the character that I wanted to follow – and that’s it – that’s the only scenes I’d see. I doubt this would be viable without first seeing the show proper, but I think it’d be a great way to explore a specific character.

As I’ve written about before, I’m a fan of Werewolf. In fact, as part of a leadership training program I developed several years ago, we made the class of leads-to-be play Werewolf because it’s, well, a great way to see how people lie.

There are problems with the classic game as written about on Boing Boing:

The two biggest problems with classic Werewolf are the need for a non-playing moderator, and the fact that players who are killed early in the game (sometimes before they get a chance to do anything at all) are in for lots of downtime.

One Night Ultimate Werewolf gets around some of the annoying parts of the classic game by making the game fast and eliminating the need for a moderator – I’m going to give it a whirl. Still, I like the longer running games where there is ongoing complex battle of wills involving the remaining players. When the game goes on for many nights, you get to see how someone truly… lies.

From Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman via qz.com:

All of this means that strong emotions in the workplace may not mean what you think they do. Don’t assume you understand their meaning until you’ve examined the context in which people are doing their work, and have found out what they’re actually doing.

Non-intuitive spot-on thinking.

Coming in at 164 slides, Mary Meeker (partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers) delivers a massive annual State of the Internet deck each year and it’s worth reading a couple of times. The report provides framing and background to many of the tech-related news stories of the past year. My brief notes:

• I’ve been hearing a theory that tablets are going to be squeezed out by ever better smartphones and portables. Here’s another theory: tablets are a force of nature and not going anywhere:

• In eight years, “Made in the USA” smartphones went from 5% market share to 97%. (Slide 10)
• $38 billion in mobile advertising spend in 2013. (Slide 16)
• +95% of networks compromised in some way (Wait, what?) (Slide 18)
• We’re nowhere near the number of IPOs and amount of venture financing that occurred during the tech bubble. (Slide 21 & 22)
• 81% of high school freshman graduated in 2012, up from 74% five years ago.
• People like to look at pictures (Slide 38):

• While $1.3B is nothing to sneeze at, digital music track sales are down 6% year of year. (Slide 50)
• 1.8B+ photos uploaded a day! (Slide 62)
• There are 10 sensors in the Galaxy S5 (Gyro, fingerprint, barometer, hall, RGB ambient light, gesture, heart rate, accelerometer, proximity, compass). (Slide 67)
• Computing costs have, apparently, decreased at 33% annual for the past 23 years. (Slide 70)

• Still trying to figure out what this means, but it’s important, “A fan base shares, comments, curates, creates”. (Slide 114)
• Holy crap China. (Slide 128)

Compelling Wednesday morning piece from Quartz that explains both the four kinds of distinct decision-making styles as well as three common traps leaders who no longer find themselves making pivotal decisions as a leader.

Coming up short on ingenuity, the other key measure of leadership decision making, can also be a blind spot for many people. Often, they fail to see the extent to which they stay within the comfort zone of the status quo. They don’t know what they don’t know. From the vantage point of their comfort zone, new ideas appear as more work and disruptions than they are worth.

I still have not worn the Oculus Rift kit and I’m certain there is a holy shit moment in my future, but this (pretty cool) video only re-enforces my concern: do I want to spend my time pretending how to fly or learning how to fly.