Tools for a new trade

In the spring of 2016 I launched a weekly series of articles on the digital economy, the general premise of which has been as follows: An industrial and consumer environment built on ubiquitous connectivity, affordable and sophisticated computing, virtually unlimited data storage, and category convergences driven by the resulting information flows, will necessarily feature a different set of qualities (at every level) from those to which we had become accustomed in previous times.

The fourteen articles that have made up this series isolate different aspects of the environment described, presenting these with an emphasis on finance, strategy, markets, valuation, and general economic issues that impact enterprise and individuals alike. The entire series is collected as a unified publication on Medium for those who would like to browse through the individual posts, which are as follows:

Introduction — overview of digital dynamism and its transformations.
Fundamentals — the basic unit, the systems that form from it, and ingredients of their value.
Methods — businesses, plans and the spectrum of options in an unsteady domain.
Comparables — presence and attention as new reference points of competition.
Expectations — innovation, disruption and the consequence of high velocity that has become the norm.
Leverage — forms of debt that are not strictly financial and the new costs of such borrowing.
Cycles — reinvestment, reinvention, repackaging, with Apple as a case study.
Markets — the new climate and its moods, and the resulting focal points.
Resources — networks, optionality and gaps in our understanding of both.
Term — the expected life of products and the structures that they shape, with Facebook and Netflix as case studies.
Diffusion — effects of speed and limitlessness on Economics and its principles.
Concentration — emerging stores of value that are data banks, too deep to fail.
Portfolio — strategy and speculation during constant change, and the enterprise as a form of managed diversification.
Specialization — the individual, the changing world and our ceaseless preparation.

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Most recently, following the suggestion of more than a few friends and readers, Tools for a new trade has been published in book form. Some editorial work was necessary to support the integrated chapter format, but the substance is unchanged — possibly even enriched by the integration. Your copy is waiting for you here. If you have enjoyed these essays, or are about to, please leave a review.

I look forward to being in touch.