Podcasts about peter not

Topics: Catholic, Catholicism, Eucharist, Communion, Trapped in Catholicism, Pagan Christianity, A Church Building Every Half Mile, Bitter and Angry Apologists, Are Catholics Christians, Denominations Don't Determine Salvation, Neither Catholic Nor Protestant, The New Creation in Christ, Literally Consume Jesus, Body and Blood, Paganism and Magic, Originated in Rome Influenced By Many Greek Gods, The Word Catholic Means Universal, John 6, Eat My Flesh Drink My Blood, Comparing Himself to Manna, Manna Sent From Heaven for Life and So Was Jesus, The Flesh Counts For Nothing, Life is In His Words, Acts 1, He Literally Ascended, Ritual of Man Officiating Began with Church Fathers, Flour and Water From Factory, Wine From Factory, Eucharist Not in the Bible, Repeatedly Crucifying Jesus, Romans 6, Death No Longer Has Mastery Over Him, The Life He Lives He Lives Forever, Sacrificed Once For Sins, Hebrews 10:10, Hebrews 1:3, Eucharist Ignored Finality of the Cross, It Is Finished, John 19:30, Communion Not a Sacrament but a Full Meal, The Love Feast, The Agape, 1 Corinthians 11, Feast to Love Others and Remember What Jesus Has Done, Not Remember Our Sins, Hebrews 7:25, He Always Lives, Authority to Forgive Sins, John 20, If You Forgive Anyone's Sins, Disciples Were Not Priests, Fishermen Tax Collector and Treasurer, Disciples Were Jewish and Went to the Temple for Forgiveness Where the Priests Were, They Knew Blood Forgives, They Weren't Forgiving and Shedding Animal Blood at That Same Time, Hebrews 9:22, Without Shedding of Blood No Forgiveness, Old Covenant Still in Effect, Same Message I Tell People, Your Sins Have Been Forgiven For His Name's Sake, Forgiveness Through Confession, 1 John 1:9, Surrounding Context of 1 John, Jesus Didn't Come in the Flesh, Sin Not a Real Thing, We Touched Him, If We Say We Have No Sin, Confess Means to Agree With, All Means All, John was a Jew Who Received Forgiveness Only by Blood, Jesus Isn't repeatedly Dying Each Confession, What About Sins You Forget About, Peter Was Original Pope, Apostolic Succession, Cyprian of Carthage, Pope Means Father, Call No Man Father, Matthew 23, Pontifex Maximus, Peter Was a Fisherman, We Are All Members of a Royal Priesthood, Matthew 16, Peter is the Rock, The Gospel is the Rock, Peter Denied Jesus, Jesus Called Peter Satan, Peter Cursed the Girl Out, Peter Tried to Stop the Crucifixion, Peter Wouldn't Eat with the Gentiles, Galatians 2, Acts 5, Ananias and Sapphire, Lying About Money Is Sin, Peter Not the Original Pope or Rock, Church Fathers, Tradition of Men, Jesus and Paul Warned Against Tradition, Call No Man Father, Paul Referred to As Father in Philippians 2 and 1 Corinthians 4, Disciples and Apostles Were Not Church Fathers, No Such Thing as Church Fathers, Old Doesn't Equal Truth, Judaism is 3500 Years Old, Islam is 1400 Years Old, Church Father's Struggled With Error, All Scripture is God-Breathed, Letters Left Out of Canon for a ReasonSupport the Show.Sign up for Matt's free daily devotional! https://mattmcmillen.com/newsletter

It's not a sin to be tempted. After all, Jesus was tempted in the desert before his earthly ministry began, and he came out of it unscathed and still sinless. Is it possible for us to come out roses, too? Perhaps. But this means you must be ready for it, unlike our friend Peter. Matthew 26:30-33 30 And when they had sung a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. 31 Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of me this night. For it is written, ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock will be scattered.' 32 But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” 33 Peter answered him, “Though they all fall away because of you, I will never fall away.” 34 Jesus said to him, “Truly, I tell you, this very night, before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” 35 Peter said to him, “Even if I must die with you, I will not deny you!” And all the disciples said the same. QUESTIONS: First, we made a truth claim – “It's not a sin to be tempted.” Is this true? If so, why do we often feel guilty when we are tempted? Let's discuss this. How had Peter NOT been prepared for what lied ahead? How does one prepare for temptation? How does the church play into this? What other resources does God give us to prepare for unwanted temptation?

This is a rare two-part set of free episodes of Marketing BS. My guest today is Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. Peter was one of my early marketing mentors and I loved this interview. In Part 1 we talk about Peter's career as a marketing academic and how he came to his signature theories around how one understands the value of a company's customer base. Tomorrow we will dive deeper into those theories.You can subscribe to the podcast in your player of choice here: Apple, Sticher, TuneIn, Overcast , Spotify. Private Feed (for premium episodes).TranscriptEdward: This is Marketing BS. My guest today is Wharton Professor, Peter Fader. I consider Peter one of my founding mentors for helping me understand how marketing really works. His most important contribution to marketing, in my opinion, is that you can model future customer purchases by assuming that your customer base is made up of a heterogeneous group of customers—each with their own intrinsic purchase rate and churn rate. And that those same models can be used in radically different businesses and industries to create extremely accurate predictions. Most importantly, because these predictions are accurate, it should influence what your actual actions are to grow your business sustainably.Today, we're going to talk about Peter's career and his intellectual path to this important idea. Tomorrow we'll dive into the idea itself and how it can be used for marketers in practice.Peter, can you start by talking a little bit about how you first started exploring the idea of Buy ‘Til You Die?Peter: Sure thing, my pleasure to do so. It's funny because that characterizes my career. That's what I'm most famous for. But (A) it's not my idea, and (B) it didn't even come to me until long after I was a full professor here at Wharton.I've been building all kinds of different models of customer behavior. How many customers will we acquire, how long will they stay, how many purchases will they make, and all that sort of thing. All the time looking at different data sets, thinking about different business settings, and saying, what would be a story? What would be a model that could capture and then project that kind of behavior?Back in 2001—again, I had been a professor here for 14 years already—I was building a model to capture a phenomenon that we see all the time. They did a customer-slow-down as they gained tenure with the company. It's pretty universal. I built a bespoke model to capture that and it was good, it was fine. I got the thing published. But along the way, one of their viewers was saying, you want to benchmark your model against this Buy ‘Til You Die model. Something that was invented back in 1987. But it was really technical, it was really obscured, so I thought it was an unfair request.I went to the editor of the journal and said, don't make me do that. Don't make me benchmarking that old obscure thing. And the editor agreed that I didn't have to. But I wasn't sure he would. I actually did benchmark the models that I was developing against these older ones and found that the old ones were much, much better.It doesn't show up in that paper. I then decided to devote the rest of my life, or at least the next 18 plus years, to exploring that other model—Buy 'Til You Die. Why it's so good, different variations of it, different applications for it, different motivations, and different managerial stories around it. That's basically all I've been doing since then. Taking someone else's model and running with it, calling attention to it, and finding some reasonable success with it.Edward: When did you realize that it was close to a fundamental law and not something that just might explain some of the data some of the time?Peter: Because I took it and started applying it to lots of other data sets. Again, this was more out of curiosity than necessity. That's just what we do as scholars which is just try things out. I wasn't only looking at the breadth of applications, I was looking at the robustness even for any one application. The idea that we don't have to have a long data set, and even if we have a shorter and shorter data set, if there is missing data, or if we don't have the same inputs that we get pretty much the same results.It started convincing me that this is more than just a cute model. It started convincing me that this is actually reality. I know that it's not—and I'm going to lose all credibility with you and your listeners here—but I'd like to make an analogy between this. Brace yourself—the theory of relativity. We all view that the theory of relativity, E=mc2, and all that stuff, we treat it as if it's true. It's not. It's just a theory. It's just a model. But the thing is it's so robust and explained so many different phenomena, even phenomena that weren't observable 100 years ago when Einstein was putting these ideas out there. But we just keep seeing it “proven” over and over and over again that we just treat it as truth.Now, I don't want to say that these BTYD models have anywhere near the implications, the importance, the cosmic explanations as relativity. But I think they're similarly robust and people would just be better off viewing them as if they were true instead of spending so much time pushing back and saying why their situation is different, why the implications don't apply, and why the world is changing. Let's just accept it as truth and our life as managers would be much easier and much more successful.Edward: But I want to go back a little bit to the path that got you here. I have a theory that things people do when they're 12-14 years old affect them for their entire lives. Where were you passionate about at that age? How did those things affect your later career?Peter: Oh my goodness. Wow, a bunch of different things, all really nerdy. The one that was most normal would have been baseball. At that time—I'm embarrassed to admit this, you're getting all this bad stuff out of me, Ed—I was a huge Yankee fan. I've repented since then. I've seen the folly of my ways. I was really, really, really into baseball statistics. Unfortunately, this was before anyone had heard of Bill James, sabermetrics, or Moneyball. All of that stuff was still years, years later. But I was almost—I don't want to say—inventing some of those kinds of things but I was thinking very much along those lines. How can we take the game of baseball and break it down into its underlying components, understand those things, and really focus on the underlying story rather than just the overall observable statistics? I was obsessed over that as I still am today. The other thing is kind of weird. I've always had an obsession with dollar bills with interesting serial numbers. Mom would come back from the grocery store and I would immediately go through her dollar bills. I would say, this one on a 0-100 scale, this one gets a 60. This one, maybe a 40. This one here, that's a 95. I'm going to keep that one. I was just always obsessed with interesting numbers, interesting serial numbers.Finally, when the whole internet thing started, I bought the domain name coolnumbers.com, and still own it today. That's all that site does is you put in any 8-digit number like a dollar bill serial number and it will tell you on a 0-100 scale how cool it is on my own quirky, arbitrary, don't even try to figure out universal coolness index. It's surprisingly popular. There's a lot of other nerdy people out there, or at least with too much time on their hands. That's the kind of stuff that I was doing. Just looking for patterns in data, but without any particular purpose or societal benefit. I'm really lucky that I finally found some meaningful purpose.Edward: I'm glad that you're working for good and not evil because I think on the website, you can enter your Social Security numbers. I'm sure people are doing that every day as well.Peter: Well, right now you can only put on 8-digit numbers. I'm waiting for some kind of undergrad or someone else. Maybe one of your listeners with too much time on their hands to help me flesh out cool numbers. You could deal with, let's say, a Social Security number, a 9-digit zip code, or whatever else. I got the algorithms all worked out. I just need someone to do all the coding.But thank goodness, I haven't wasted that much more time on it over the last 20 years. I had better things to do.Edward: You went to college for mathematics, but then you did a Ph.D. in marketing. Why did you switch?Peter: It wasn't my choice. There are very few people who say, Mommy, I want to be a marketing professor. It doesn't come up on career day when you're in middle school. It's an interesting story by itself because I indeed was just a solid math major. All I liked doing was crunching numbers, playing around with integrals, and all that sort of stuff. I didn't know what I would do for a living. I figured either end up as an actuary—calculating risks for insurance companies, I'd go to Wall Street, or maybe I'd go work for the NSA and break codes or whatever else.I was exploring all of these different options until this one professor, this marketing professor, her name is Leigh McAlister. She's still very active today at the University of Texas now, not MIT where I first met her. She came to me one day back in 1982 and said, you ought to be a marketing professor. You ought to get your Ph.D. in marketing. I looked at her and said, you ought to get your head checked because I'm a math guy, I'm not going into marketing. But she laid out this vision—again, keep in mind this was 1982, that's like 500 years ago.Edward: That's before finance was even getting into mathematics, let alone marketing.Peter: But she laid out this picture of what marketing would become. She was exactly right. That there will come a day when we'll be able to tag and track individual customers, know what they're doing, and then get some sense of which message we should send to which customer at which time. We're going to need rock-solid math underneath all that to figure it out, to make these decisions, and to evaluate those decisions. I didn't believe her, but she was very persuasive and she forced me to get a Ph.D. She literally—I'm not exaggerating—forced me to take this job offer at Wharton. I had offers from lots of other good schools, but she said, “Wharton is the place for you. It will have the people, the resources, the culture to let you pursue your quantitative passions in this domain.” And here I am. Now, this is year 34 on the faculty, calling her up every 6 months or so, saying thank you, thank you, thank you. She did change my life by pushing me in a direction that, again, I would have never imagined, and even actively resisted at that time. But boy was she right on every one of these dimensions. My whole life is just paying it forward to her in every way possible.Edward: If you hadn't met her, where do you think you would have ended up?Peter: Either a Wall Street firm or again maybe an actuarial firm. I took the first bunch of exams that actuaries take. I did an internship with an insurance company. I could see that there was some alignment there, but at the same time, it's not an industry that lends itself to creativity.I want to come up with new models, new explanations, new stories, just new methods. Whereas in insurance, even on Wall Street, and most of these other domains, it's once you have the way of doing things. It's just shut up and do it. I would have ended up doing one of those kinds of things. Maybe I would have been happy, who knows? I like to make myself happy no matter what's going on.But nothing could make me happier than the path that I followed. To have the colleagues, the resources, the incentives to come up with new stuff, and then brilliant students, including people like yourself who have taken some of those ideas and run with them, whether in academic directions or in commercial directions. I've just been super lucky to ride their coattails academically and commercially to find success both ways.Edward: Long before Buy ‘Til You Die, your first significant research was into strategies in a generalized prisoner's dilemma. What exactly did you find?Peter: Wow. That's a blast from the past. My dissertation at MIT—very few people know this because I tend to focus on all these predictive models of customer behavior and so on. But my dissertation couldn't have been more different.Indeed, I was looking at the prisoner's dilemma. I'm assuming that many of your listeners are familiar with it already. If not, they can search for it. There's so much out there on it. There's a lot of people who have been trying to “solve the prisoner's dilemma,” coming up with strategies that would be very effective in this very simple two by two game. Do I take the temptation to rat out that person, cut-price, or do the nasty action; or will I be good?The problem with the basic prisoner's dilemma, as they just implied, is that it has two players—me against you, and only have two alternatives because each of us does the aggressive tactic or the kind of nice tactic. Solving it, in that case, is fine but not very practical because in the real world, there's going to be lots of other complications, and let's just focus on two of them.Number one, there's going to be multiple players out there. There's going to be three or more firms. In fact, just moving from two to three is a giant leap forward because all of a sudden, if person number three does the nasty thing, what do I do? Do I wait for you—the nice guy, or do I respond to the nasty one? It's very, very complicated and we start getting all confused because if I react to him, then you react to me, and you get into this downward spiral.Number two, there can be multiple alternatives. Not just do you do the thing or not, but it can be shades of gray. You can be setting prices or discounts or even oil output levels if you think about OPEC. The generalized prisoner's dilemma that I put forth had a continuous range of alternatives. It was a price-setting and three players. It generalized, it built upon all the basic ideas of the textbook, two by two prisoner's dilemma. But it added all kinds of interesting complications, yet it still lent itself to some surprisingly robust strategies. Strategies that I explored in my dissertation. We've seen an interesting range of examples in business, in sports, and in life itself, where some of these strategies do tend to play out and lead to effective outcomes.Edward: In addition to your research, you've co-founded a few companies. Talk to me about Zodiac and how that happened.Peter: This goes right back to something I was saying a few minutes ago, which is riding the coattails of brilliant students both in the academic direction as well as the commercial. It's building out this Buy ‘Til You Die model, and they're really good. They worked really well. But most of the time, I was either just working on academic stuff to try to come up with new tweaks of them or just going to companies and trying to give them the academic version saying, here you ought to use this. Here, this model is good for you. Here's the code. Here's the spreadsheet. Here's the technical note. Here are some case studies. But the problem is, companies either found it a little bit too academic, or the kinds of data they were looking at was just so messy, so complex, or so large that the academic versions just weren't quite right for them. Back in late 2014, I had a conversation with one of my brilliant undergraduates. He basically had some ideas to make the models much more practical—to be able to run faster, to be able to run just much more efficiently. Brought in a couple of other folks, and we founded this company. First, we called it CLV Metrics—Customer Lifetime Value Metrics—kind of a lame name. And then we decided, you know what, we're getting such good traction on it. Let's make it real. We brought in some venture capital money. We started hiring a whole team. We changed the name to Zodiac, and it was a wonderful success.We work with a wide variety of firms. Whether it's retailers, travel and hospitality, telcos, gaming, pharmaceuticals, or lots of different B2B applications and different kinds of services. Just applying this Buy ‘Til You Die model in a wide range of scenarios and finding all kinds of success, all kinds of interesting tactical-use cases—it was really great. But of course, talking in the past tense, because in 2018 one of our clients came along and said, we want it all, and that client was Nike. We sold to Nike in March 2018, which again, was a wonderful outcome by itself, but also a tremendous validation for the usefulness, not just the academic interest in this, but the commercial usefulness of the models.Edward: We're going to go more into the usefulness of it tomorrow on our second podcast. You later, though, founded another company called Theta Equity Partners and this was different from Zodiac, correct?Peter: Yes and no. On one hand, there's the no part which is, at the very core, this very similar set of models, this Buy ‘Til You Die model. But the motivation and the main use case couldn't be more different. Back in the Zodiac days, besides working with lots of different companies that I described before, one of our clients was a private equity firm. They weren't that interested in figuring out which message to send to which customer. All they wanted to do was to say, listen, can you come up with the projected value of each and every customer, add all that stuff up, and tell us that number because we're thinking of buying that digitally native women's cosmetics company.We figured the best way to judge its valuation isn't through the usual top-down multiple approach, but it's from the bottom-up—how many customers will we acquire, how long will they stay, how much will they spend. That's what we did—the idea of customer-based corporate valuation. After we sold Zodiac to Nike along with one of my Zodiac co-founders, Dan McCarthy, we co-founded Theta Equity Partners. That's all we're doing is customer-based corporate valuation, working with private equity firms, family offices. I'm working with a lot of companies directly just to help them understand, unlock, and fully leverage all of that customer value. It's less about the marketer. It's just less about the tactics. It's more about finance, valuation, corporate governance, big strategic decisions, and again, it's been great. The models work well. It's probably an even more receptive audience—the finance people than the marketing people. Once you go over the finance people, then it becomes very easy to win over the marketing people as well.Edward: It's interesting, 38 years or so after you left finance to go into marketing, you're right back where you started with finance.Peter: I have to admit, I feel like a fish out of water because it's not really my home. It's not my core domain. I've been learning a lot over these last couple of years and I have tremendous respect for the people in finance and more and more every day. I can bring them a tool that they don't have through these models and through these perspectives. But the ways that they deploy it, some of these are very clever, smart, resourceful things they do, you could see why they are the big dog in most organizations and why people respect, maybe even fear finance much more than they do marketing. Because my objective is to bring them together and to get marketing and finance on the same level using the same models for strategic as well as tactical purposes, and we'll talk more about that.Edward: Peter,what was the biggest failure point in your career? What's the biggest mistake that you made?Peter: There's a difference between failure and mistakes. Let me talk about one of each. Maybe the saddest moment in my career—the one night I literally cried myself to sleep—was losing the Napster case. As I've said many times now, I'm interested in a broad variety of applications. I spent a lot of time in the ‘90s and early 2000s working with or maybe fighting with the music industry—there are amazingly good patterns there. It's very predictable. It's one of the better sectors if you want to apply the models, but it's a sector where they don't apply the models.Long story short, I got caught up in the Napster case, the original Napster, an original file sharing service that changed everything. I was with the good guys. Napster is trying to make the case why that file sharing service is the greatest possible thing for the music industry and making that case why it's good and why it will bring in lots of money. I wrote this whole long statement, did all this research about it back in the glorious summer of 2000, but Judge Marilyn Hall Patel, she pretty much rejected everything I said. She basically said, the idea that file-sharing could be good for the industry is preposterous and any research that would draw such a conclusion must be gravely flawed. I think those are her exact words.Edward: Your conclusion was wrong regardless of your methods.Peter: Exactly right. In the end, it didn't really matter. The reason why Napster was shut down, it had nothing to do with whether it hurt or helped the industry. But the fact is, it was against the law. The law might be stupid, that's a whole other question, so it was shut down. But I took it personally. I felt that this was a true failure on my part. I let down the revolution. It wasn't a mistake. It's just that I was betting on the wrong horse.Edward: How'd that changed things? Did you change your strategies going forward because of that event?Peter: Not really. It just made me want to fight harder. It's actually interesting. I said, look, this is just wrong. We need to show the industry that they are making a terrible mistake. In the early 2000s, I spent a lot of time banging on the door of the music industry, saying, listen, let's go after this together. Let's do the research to show the circumstances under which file-sharing helps, hurts, or is neutral. Let's really understand it. Let's understand the business implications. Let's not just stop at music. Let's talk about TV, movies, publishing, and basically all areas of media and entertainment.I set up a Research Center at Wharton for the Wharton Media & Entertainment Initiative. That went nowhere. Then we got a donation to set up the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, and that was very successful. That then morphed into the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, which continues to flourish today. I spent a lot of time expanding on it. One might say pivoting from the work in the music industry to try to make a difference with models and understanding of customer data. It's just that the music industry and entertainment, in general, weren't all that receptive. It's just a matter of shopping these ideas and methods around to find a more receptive audience, which we did find a lot of success with.Edward: Tell me about the iPhone.Peter: Yeah, that was a mistake. A little bit of arrogance on my part. I was big into the BlackBerry. I mean that was a transformative device. Wow. When the iPhone came along, I staked out. I went way out on a limb staking out exactly the wrong turf saying, this device will just never catch on. Look at just how different it is. Look at all the features of a BlackBerry that it lacks. I'm never shy about my opinions. Usually, they're based more on data than just pure hunches. This case, pure hunch, wrong hunch, and I basically said that this is going to go down in history as a colossal failure. And again, I wasn't shy about it.When the iPhone celebrated its 10th anniversary of just a ginormous success a couple of years ago, people went out and found some of these—the incredibly dumb things that I said as it was being launched. I'll admit it. I'm big enough to acknowledge my mistakes. That's far from the only one. But probably the one that I got in—I don't want to say trouble, there's no trouble there—the most s**t for and entirely well-deserved. Even though I'm still not a big fan of Apple—I literally have never owned a single Apple device. Again, not that I'm against them but I just like buttons. I like to press things, whatever. I've learned better than to bet against them.Edward: This has been fantastic. We're going to come back again tomorrow to talk more about Buy ‘Til You Die. Thank you so much.Peter: Sure thing. It's always good talking to you. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketingbs.substack.com

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Jana: So we have homework, tests, what about attendance? Should we require students to attend classes or? Sometimes people argue at university level it shouldn't be compulsory.Peter: I think you should attend some classes at least. You're going to university, you're paying for your education so you should attend some classes but it doesn't mean if you're not attending a class that you can still get the information and study by yourself too. That's why I like internet so much because I think people can get so much information from academic institutions via the internet, they don't have to attend a physical class.Jana: That's right and on the other hand you might attend physically but you're not really paying attention.Peter:Exactly. You might as well sleep in class sometimes. It doesn't prove that you're learning if you're there. It depends on the person again I think.Jana: So maybe rather than strictly checking attendance, we should check what the students have learned?Peter: Yes, and how do you do that?Jana: That's right. Now we come back to that.Peter: Testing? I don't know. I think there are other ways of finding out if students have learned things if they, you don't have to call things tests, you can set students tasks to find out if they can do the required task without calling it a test.Jana: That's right and then it becomes maybe a bit more practical too.Peter: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so.Jana: Did you do a lot of projects when you were a student?Peter: Not so many and I think when I studied like education has quite changed in the last twenty years or so and I think people are doing more projects than they used to do when I was a student for the first time but I really like projects because I think it's putting your knowledge to work and finding out how you can apply your knowledge to make it practical and usable so I really like projects. I wish I could give my students more projects.Jana: Yeah, that's true. Maybe they'll be better than tests.Peter: I think so too, yeah. It's a better way to find out if people know things if you give them a project that involves what they've studied.Jana: And in the real life they won't be taking tests anymore. They need to be able to apply the knowledge, right?Peter: Exactly, yeah, exactly. Do you use projects a lot in your class?Jana: Not as much. As you know, we have quite a strict schedule so that we need to follow but like you I also didn't have a lot of projects in my school when I was growing up but yeah, I think it's definitely something to think about.Peter: Yeah. Kind of tricky to give a project in language, like making a language project. For example, I remember doing biology projects.Jana: Right.Peter: Then you go out and you find information and you do research so you can find stuff but for doing, how do you do that for a language? Do you have any ideas?Jana: That's a very good question. Yeah, just to use the language, right? That's the main project, isn't it?Peter: Yeah, I guess. See if you can use the language in different ways like for example.Jana: There is some homework for us to think about.Peter: I think so too. Yeah, let's think about that.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Jana: So we have homework, tests, what about attendance? Should we require students to attend classes or? Sometimes people argue at university level it shouldn't be compulsory.Peter: I think you should attend some classes at least. You're going to university, you're paying for your education so you should attend some classes but it doesn't mean if you're not attending a class that you can still get the information and study by yourself too. That's why I like internet so much because I think people can get so much information from academic institutions via the internet, they don't have to attend a physical class.Jana: That's right and on the other hand you might attend physically but you're not really paying attention.Peter:Exactly. You might as well sleep in class sometimes. It doesn't prove that you're learning if you're there. It depends on the person again I think.Jana: So maybe rather than strictly checking attendance, we should check what the students have learned?Peter: Yes, and how do you do that?Jana: That's right. Now we come back to that.Peter: Testing? I don't know. I think there are other ways of finding out if students have learned things if they, you don't have to call things tests, you can set students tasks to find out if they can do the required task without calling it a test.Jana: That's right and then it becomes maybe a bit more practical too.Peter: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so.Jana: Did you do a lot of projects when you were a student?Peter: Not so many and I think when I studied like education has quite changed in the last twenty years or so and I think people are doing more projects than they used to do when I was a student for the first time but I really like projects because I think it's putting your knowledge to work and finding out how you can apply your knowledge to make it practical and usable so I really like projects. I wish I could give my students more projects.Jana: Yeah, that's true. Maybe they'll be better than tests.Peter: I think so too, yeah. It's a better way to find out if people know things if you give them a project that involves what they've studied.Jana: And in the real life they won't be taking tests anymore. They need to be able to apply the knowledge, right?Peter: Exactly, yeah, exactly. Do you use projects a lot in your class?Jana: Not as much. As you know, we have quite a strict schedule so that we need to follow but like you I also didn't have a lot of projects in my school when I was growing up but yeah, I think it's definitely something to think about.Peter: Yeah. Kind of tricky to give a project in language, like making a language project. For example, I remember doing biology projects.Jana: Right.Peter: Then you go out and you find information and you do research so you can find stuff but for doing, how do you do that for a language? Do you have any ideas?Jana: That's a very good question. Yeah, just to use the language, right? That's the main project, isn't it?Peter: Yeah, I guess. See if you can use the language in different ways like for example.Jana: There is some homework for us to think about.Peter: I think so too. Yeah, let's think about that.

更多英语知识，请关注微信公众号: VOA英语每日一听 Jana: So we have homework, tests, what about attendance? Should we require students to attend classes or? Sometimes people argue at university level it shouldn't be compulsory.Peter: I think you should attend some classes at least. You're going to university, you're paying for your education so you should attend some classes but it doesn't mean if you're not attending a class that you can still get the information and study by yourself too. That's why I like internet so much because I think people can get so much information from academic institutions via the internet, they don't have to attend a physical class.Jana: That's right and on the other hand you might attend physically but you're not really paying attention.Peter:Exactly. You might as well sleep in class sometimes. It doesn't prove that you're learning if you're there. It depends on the person again I think.Jana: So maybe rather than strictly checking attendance, we should check what the students have learned?Peter: Yes, and how do you do that?Jana: That's right. Now we come back to that.Peter: Testing? I don't know. I think there are other ways of finding out if students have learned things if they, you don't have to call things tests, you can set students tasks to find out if they can do the required task without calling it a test.Jana: That's right and then it becomes maybe a bit more practical too.Peter: Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think so.Jana: Did you do a lot of projects when you were a student?Peter: Not so many and I think when I studied like education has quite changed in the last twenty years or so and I think people are doing more projects than they used to do when I was a student for the first time but I really like projects because I think it's putting your knowledge to work and finding out how you can apply your knowledge to make it practical and usable so I really like projects. I wish I could give my students more projects.Jana: Yeah, that's true. Maybe they'll be better than tests.Peter: I think so too, yeah. It's a better way to find out if people know things if you give them a project that involves what they've studied.Jana: And in the real life they won't be taking tests anymore. They need to be able to apply the knowledge, right?Peter: Exactly, yeah, exactly. Do you use projects a lot in your class?Jana: Not as much. As you know, we have quite a strict schedule so that we need to follow but like you I also didn't have a lot of projects in my school when I was growing up but yeah, I think it's definitely something to think about.Peter: Yeah. Kind of tricky to give a project in language, like making a language project. For example, I remember doing biology projects.Jana: Right.Peter: Then you go out and you find information and you do research so you can find stuff but for doing, how do you do that for a language? Do you have any ideas?Jana: That's a very good question. Yeah, just to use the language, right? That's the main project, isn't it?Peter: Yeah, I guess. See if you can use the language in different ways like for example.Jana: There is some homework for us to think about.Peter: I think so too. Yeah, let's think about that.

  Sermon - 1 Peter 1:3-9 1 Peter 1:3-9 - Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade. This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God’s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the end result of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Introduction Last week we looked at 1 Peter 1:1-2 & 2:11-12, under the title “Living in the face of alienation and its cure”. The Apostle Peter was writing to a group of people, followers of Jesus, spread throughout what we know as modern Turkey. These believing sojourners were undergoing trials, suffering & persecution. Peter instructs them toward Christian stability, and the proper expression of this stability and growth. Throughout the letter, Peter stresses a hope so alive, so glorious and so very certain, that any persecution, trial and suffering can be endured. These people are sojourners or pilgrims on a spiritual journey! Last week we discovered that Peter reminds them of the God they worship and live for - a missional & relational God of salvation. A loving God who is Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God the Father has chosen and is calling all people to Himself, out of amazing love for them. God the Holy Spirit sanctifies and cleanses to allow people to enter God’s holy presence through the obedient sacrifice of God the Son. ----more----Then we learnt together about how within the believer, that there is a battle. A spiritual battle – the old earthly human nature battling against the new nature of the believer given to them by God. Salvation is yours, Peter says, so go let the world know that this salvation can be theirs also, by living so devoted to God, that He permeates every facet of your life. That people will know you are God’s possession and God lives through you! WOW! The believing sojourner is to live such a good life that they are good witnesses for the God in whom they believe! We also know that this group of people are undergoing various forms of suffering and grief. Not the least, sporadic events of persecution but also the possibility of systematic persecution to come.So now we come to tonight’s reading – 1 Peter 1:3-9. Again we will start out by looking at God, before going onto looking at a reaction to this great God of whom Peter continues to reveal. Here in this first section from 1:1 to 2:9, Peter touches on subjects which he will elucidate upon later in the letter. 1. God the Joy Giver! Peter continues in this the first section of his letter. The natural second section of the letter starts in 1 Peter 2:11 as we saw last week under the title “Living in the face of alienation and its cure”. Tonight we move on under the title “Living in the joy of salvation…” This naturally implies that there is a joy giver and a salvation! Who is the giver of this “joy” and what is joy?Let’s look briefly at who Peter says this joy giver is! The Joy Giver! In v3, Peter continues praising His God and the God of His readers. This God is the joy giver! Let’s look very briefly at some aspects of this God whom Peter reveals!a. Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ v3 Peter would have remembered the words of Jesus, the Son, who told him and the others disciples to call God, Father! Father God is the one who calls and beckons all people to Himself. He is the Father of the Son, Jesus Christ, but not in a way such as He created the Son, for the Son has always existed and was never created. God the Father is a Father in that the He plans and directs, while the Son responds obediently. God the Father sent the Son, and Jesus Himself said he had come from the Father and was returning to the Father. Again we looked briefly at that relationship last week. The joy giver is to be praised!b. his great mercy he has given v3 This God is a merciful God! He does not give people what they deserve – which is death for humanity’s wilful rebellion, but He offers salvation – a new birth! The mercy of God is the goodness of God to those in distress - tenderness & compassion! WOW! How is the new birth possible? c. resurrection of Jesus Christ v3 This new birth is only possible through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which we celebrate at Easter. Resurrection means more than just coming back to life! Jesus raised at least three people from the dead, but that was more resuscitation than resurrection! Those resuscitated people came back to life with their normal bodies and they would go on to die a physical death again! Jesus’ resurrection was different in that He also had a new body! WOW!Jesus’ resurrection proved and vindicated all of His teaching. Jesus’ resurrection, witnessed by Peter and many others, certified and attested to His claims to be who He said he was – God. If Jesus had not been resurrected, then be assured Peter would not now be in Rome as a witness for this Jesus! No way! He would probably have gone back to being a fisherman - not as he is now – a leading figure in the embryonic church. Or at best Peter would be cowering away in fear for retribution from the religious leaders of his day.The resurrection was also God the Father’s approval of His Son Jesus’ obedient service. The fulfilment of all the Old Testament promises are declared through the resurrection. The result of which, is inheritance and salvation for all those who respond to God the Father’s calling! But more about that later as we continue to explore our bible passage for tonight!d. Jesus Christ is revealed v7 Jesus will return and be revealed for who He is and in fully glory for the world to see! Jesus said so during His earthly life and it is mentioned 318 times within the New Testament. Jesus is returning. Not as a human baby this time but as a conquering majestic Prince of Peace. When will He come? No-one knows! But it will happen unexpectedly! Expect the unexpected! God Himself is the joy giver! 2. Living Out Joy! So if that is the joy giver, what is joy and how is the Christian, the receiver of salvation, to live in the light of this joy? Let us look briefly at each of this series of mini-pictures given to us by Peter!a. New birth v3 Back in verse 3, when Peter says “born anew”, he is echoing the very words of Jesus who said that only those who are born again or born anew will see and experience the kingdom of God and have the salvation of their souls (John 3:3). What does Peter mean here? Just as each person has a physical body, each person also has a spirit. Now our spirit is our spiritual system, which is seen in our consciousness of God and in our faith and conscience. A spiritual birth is required in order to give a spiritual life, just as a physical birth gives physical life. Each person is made up of a physical body and an internal spirit. That is why Peter says that all those who are followers of Jesus have been born anew or have been born again! This phrase can also be translated “born from above”. It is also something that a human cannot do by their own efforts! It can only be a work of God! It is from His twin wellsprings of grace and mercy, that people can have this new life! Grace – getting what we don’t deserve and mercy – not getting what we do deserve.b. Living hope v3 Because believers have this new life, been born anew, they have a new hope. Not a dead hope as some might imagine but a living and dynamic hope! As it is living, Peter is stating that the hope within the believer is to grow and flourish! As the believer continues living life here on earth, the hope is to continue to grow and develop! It is a hope which is dynamic as it is growing in confidence and expectation! What is this living hope to be in and for?c. Inheritance v4 Peter goes on! This living hope is for the inheritance of the believer! Part of this inheritance is the new body of the believer! The believer will also be resurrected just as Jesus was! This inheritance is described by Peter as imperishable, unspoilt and unfading! No doubt the readers of this letter would have thought back to the time when the nation of Israel was promised the land of Israel as an inheritance. But the inheritance Peter is referring to is not a physical kingdom, property or possessions! No! Those things will rot, rust, perish, decay and fade away as time goes on. Don’t put your hope in those things cries Peter! Putting hope in them is not a living hope but a dead hope! O sojourner of Jesus Christ, writes Peter, put your hope, your living hope, in your glorious inheritance to come! You will have an inheritance and life which is pure, undefiled and unpolluted by sin! No suffering there in this inheritance! And where is this inheritance now, Peter? Not on earth says Peter! This inheritance is being kept in heaven for you and each person who follows Jesus Christ and perseveres! This is a personal inheritance. Each person must be born anew into this living hope. Where are you tonight? Have you taken up this living and dynamic hope and been born anew by God’s grace and mercy? Don’t leave tonight without speaking to somebody about it!d. shielded by God’s power v5 As we know, again from last week, Peter is writing to groups of people, who maybe coming under increasing persecution – or soon will be, particularly from the Romans. We know that in the year 64AD, systemic persecution of Christians came about under the Emperor Nero. How will God’s people, those He has chosen as his, be protected? Peter is writing to encourage these believers! This inheritance is theirs! They have been born anew! They are God the Father’s chosen and well loved children! What about when persecution comes? Who will protect them and keep their inheritance safe? Peter tells them that they will be shielded or guarded by God Himself! God will keep them safe! Just as God kept the spies into the land of Canaan way back in the Old Testament. It is a guarding, which is not only protection but also a shielding away. It is the security of their salvation which God also protects. Will any fall away from God when persecution hits them? Will they be able to stand? If they rely on God’s power and strength and continue to put their personal faith and trust in Him, then they will indeed be energized, sustained and safeguarded. We know from other passages of Scripture, that God the Son, Jesus Christ intercedes for us to God the Father! WOW! This guarding work is not just for the inheritance but something else too! Peter goes on in v5!e. Salvation – future v5 This safeguarding is also for the salvation of the believing sojourner! Salvation has three tenses to it! A believer has been saved (justified); is being saved (sanctified) and will be saved! One glorious day the believer will come into his or her full inheritance! They will have full possession of all that God the Father has kept for them. It will be revealed one day – keep having hope, says the Apostle Peter! We looked briefly at that last week.The believer has been born anew into a living and dynamic hope for the future! Chosen by God the Father and called by Him to be His child! His child who is regenerated, renewed and cleansed by God the Holy Spirit through the obedient life and sacrifice of God the Son, Jesus Christ who rose up from the dead! WOW!f. Rejoice v6Peter continues! Peter seems to be saying here in v6 “Rejoice, believers and keep on rejoicing just as you are indeed doing! When you think about your future inheritance, rejoice! Rejoice, sojourners, in your future hope and inheritance!”To rejoice is to have a deep and glorious spiritual joy! It is rejoicing in God with deep joy! Now remember these believers are suffering and some will indeed suffer more. As Peter says they may have to suffer and endure trials which are to come. What are these suffering and trials? We cannot be certain but every human that has ever lived in some way has suffered somehow. Indeed the very process of physical birth is a kind of suffering – for baby, mother and father! These believers are enduring all sorts of trials. Trials put upon them by satan, put upon them by other people as well as natural trials such as sickness and death. But Peter here says may have to suffer. Suffer for simply being believers perhaps as the shadow of persecution hovers above them?These trials, suffering and griefs are temporary and incomparable to glory which awaits the believer who holds on and perseveres. Peter says that suffering, trials and griefs go hand in hand with joy – deep joy! More about joy soon! 3. Faith! a. Faith’s genuineness v7 Why are they suffering? Peter goes on to say that the trials have come to prove their faith in God. Faith is trusting in God. How will they trust in God as they undergo such ordeals! How will their faith be exhibited! These trials and griefs will show the genuine nature of these believing sojourners faith. They are to refine and purify the believer, just as gold is refined by fire. Even though on earth gold is one of the most durable substances, one day it will perish. Just as all this old earth will. Genuine faith and real trust in God is far more enduring and valuable than placing faith in gold, because God is to be the object of the believer’s faith. God’s evaluation of these believers, these sojourners, is of higher value than the opinion of mere humans. God’s evaluation is basis for faith in Him by these believing sojourners who Peter is writing to. This faith of theirs is to be shown in praise to and of Jesus Christ. This genuine faith of theirs, which is to always to seek to give praise, honour and glory to Jesus. This genuine faith is expressed with joy. Particularly as we saw earlier when Jesus Christ is revealed in His divine post-resurrection glory. When all of humanity will be judged and the secret desires of the hearts of humans is revealed. b. Faith’s love v8 The object of the Christian’s faith, Peter goes on, is Jesus Christ and Him alone. Peter of course had known Jesus personally. Peter had seen Jesus, been called by Jesus, was rebuked by Jesus and regularly frustrated Jesus. This Peter had also betrayed Jesus and was forgiven by him. Peter had loved Jesus and was still loving Jesus. Jesus loved Peter. This Peter had seen the resurrected Jesus before witnessing Jesus, God the Son, ascend back to the right hand of God the Father. But these believers had not had those experiences. They had heard the stories for sure and the testimony of witnesses to the person of Jesus. Not only were these believers to have faith in Jesus, but to express their love of Him. Peter is saying faith is personal, individual and to express your faith in Jesus by loving Him and being obedient to Him. These believers Peter was writing to loved Jesus and were expressing it by living lives worthy of Him. Could that describe you here tonight?c. Faith’s belief v8 Moreover this genuine faith of love is in evidence through their belief. That is their trust in Jesus, resting their confidence in Him because He is dependable and reliable. It is a personal relationship between Jesus and the believer. It is resting entirely upon Him for all things. Again – could that describe you here tonight in 2013?d. Faith’s joy v8 How is this faith expressed? This faith, Peter goes on, is expressed in and through joy or exultation! Old Testament language and experiences such as in our reading from the book of joy, Leviticus, told of the glory of God being revealed! Moses and Aaron, as we read in Leviticus, come out from tent, give a blessing to the people and God’s glory appeared to the nation! It must have been some blessing Aaron gave! Whatever the words that were expressed, they were words that invocated Almighty God’s power, presence and peace to be with and upon His people. No wonder the people fell on the ground with their noses in the dirt as an act of joyful worship and praise to God! So amazing was this sight that a tremendous wave of exuberant joy overcame the people and they all fell with their face in the ground! There was probably a mixture of amazement, surprise and reverent fear! This was not just joy as a mere emotion, but true exultant joy as evidenced through sacrifice, praise and testimony! The intended readers of Peter’s letters would have been well acquainted with such passages in what is our Old Testament – where the bright shining radiance of God’s glory was revealed. An exultant joy which is inexpressible and glorious!e. Faith’s outcome v9 And what does Peter say is the outcome or result of each of these sojourners faith? It is the salvation of their soul. Salvation as we have looked at earlier tonight as well as in last week’s study. A salvation which is the work of God the Trinity: God the Father has chosen and calls all people to himself, out of love for them. God the Holy Spirit sanctifies, sets apart and cleanses people to allow them to enter God’s holy presence. This entrance is only through the obedient sacrifice of God the Son. Conclusion So with all that said, let’s briefly recapitulate before we conclude.Firstly we looked at a God who is to be praised; a God who is merciful in giving new life to those who respond personally to His call. As evidence of this new and living hope, He sent His Son who came to earth as a human, lived, died and was resurrected to new life. This Son ascended to be at His right hand once more. This Son, Jesus Christ will be coming back again one day. Meanwhile, all those who place their faith and hope in Jesus Christ, will be shielded, safeguarded and protected by God Himself. Indeed, their salvation is assured and safeguarded. But if they were to die, they would be still shielded and safeguarded by God, because their salvation was assured and they would be in His presence. God shields and safeguards His people.Secondly we then looked at this new life or new hope in more detail. This new hope is living, dynamic and the believer has a glorious inheritance and salvation. This is given by God and God alone from his twin wellsprings of grace and mercy.Then lastly we looked at Faith’s genuineness, Faith’s love, Faith’s belief, Faith’s joy and finally Faith’s outcome which is the salvation of the soul.With that said, how are we to conclude tonight? How are we, in the 21st century, to respond and react to Peter in this section of his letter? For those of us who would call ourselves a Christian - a sojourner of Jesus Christ – you believe in Him and have placed your faith in Him for new hope, new life and salvation of your soul. I wonder what trials including alienation and persecution you have undergone in the past, are undergoing at the moment or will persevere through in the future. I don’t even know how I will suffer and grieve in the future. But I do know who has the answers to our trials and testing. It is my God and your God. Our God of love – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He knows the answers and I have to trust in Him. Are you currently undergoing any sort of trial - run to God! He will listen! He is your protector, your guard and your empowerer! Remember He lives within you! He loves you! He cares for you! He is a personal God who has your best interests at heart! As Christians we worship and serve a God who knows intimately about personal suffering. Our God isn’t an inanimate and passive carving, to be placed on a shelf or a wall which is immune to the suffering of the world. No! Our God is a personal, dynamic and active God who knows the suffering we ourselves endure – because He Himself has suffered. He is an intimate, dynamic, responsive and living personal being who has shared in our sufferings through Jesus when He died on a cross 2000 years ago. This same Jesus who was resurrected and raised to new life and witnessed by our author - the Apostle Peter! WOW! The ineffable God made known to humanity in the man Jesus Christ. As part of our new hope and new life as Christians, as sojourners of Jesus Christ, we await that glorious day in the future when He has come again. That day when Jesus Christ will take your face in his scarred hands, and wipe away your tears. Wipe away your tears – tears of pain released and tears of ineffable and inexplicable joy! WOW! You and I will know then, that it was all worth it – the sufferings and trials that we have endured in this life, in order to enter the new life to come. Amazing! WOW!On that final day, when your faith is tested, will it be proven to be genuine? Let this faith of yours always seek to give praise, honour and glory to Jesus and Him alone. May it be a faith being worked out by you living a life which is worthy of Him alone – which is seen by those currently not in the faith. Your genuine faith being expressed with inexplicable joy to those outside. As Christians here, just as it was last week, it is an imperative that we go and show our new life, new hope, empowered and safeguarded by God’s power alone. Persecution may come and we will in some quarters even now be rejected. But we persevere. As Christians, we have good news for the world – it is up to us to go out living in the joy of salvation. We will be alienated by some, but also embraced by others. God is for us – who then shall we fear? God is a mission God – Peter clearly knows that – and because He is a mission God, we too are also on a mission. We have to take risks in order to continue this mission. History is filled with churches that failed to adapt and take the mission opportunities available to them. Will we be like that? I for one certainly do not hope so. We need to be reaching out, including those forgotten people – the people who cannot get out of their own homes for what ever reason. Helping those people who are already Christians and helping those who are not yet Christian, to find this living hope in God.God is a tri-unity of Love... The Father loves the Son and the Spirit. The Son loves the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit loves the Father and the Son. We as a church are also to be a community of love. A love which mirrors that of the God of love... A love which looks not to its own interests but to the interests of others... Let's go love... Encourage others - not just your friends or those you like... Let's go encourage others enduring all sorts of tests and trials, just as Peter has done to this group of spiritual sojourners... God loves you... Let's reflect the God we claim to love, follow and obey...Tonight, you maybe in need of prayer because of some trial or suffering you are currently undergoing. We would love to pray with you and for you.Again, I am compelled to say this. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Maybe you are here tonight, and you would not call yourself a Christian. Then please do not leave here tonight without asking somebody here about how you can become one and start this new life and the new hope which only those who are Christian can claim. God the Father’s love is calling you. God the Father has chosen you. God the Holy Spirit is waiting to set you apart and cleanse you. God the Son is waiting for you to accept his obedient sacrifice. Come!   Right Mouse clickor tap here to save this as an audio mp3 file You can now purchase our Partakers books! Please do click or tap here to visit our Amazon site! Click or tap on the appropriate link below to subscribe, share or download our iPhone App!

My guest today is Peter Merholz. Peter is one of the co-founders of the pioneering UX design consultancy Adaptive Path, now part of Capital One. After leaving Adaptive Path, he has structured and led design teams in various organizations. Peter and his co-author, Kristin Skinner, wrote Org Design for Design Orgs, the book on how to organize design teams. In this episode, we discuss how the structure of organizations influences their customer's experiences. Listen to the full conversation https://theinformeddotlife.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/the-informed-life-episode-28-peter-merholz-2.mp3   Show notes PeterMerholz.com @peterme on Twitter Adaptive Path Org Design for Design Orgs: Building and Managing In-House Design Teams by Peter Merholz and Kristin Skinner Liftoff: Practical Design Leadership to Elevate Your Team, Your Organization, and You by Chris Avore and Russ Unger The Informed Life Episode 22: Andrea Mignolo on Designerly Ways of Being IDEO Tim Brown The Double Diamond Conway's Law Organization in the Way: How Decentralization Hobbles the User Experience by Peter Merholz MacGuffin Shopify Forrester Research Kristin Skinner Read the full transcript Jorge: Welcome to the show, Peter. Peter: Thank you Jorge. Jorge: So, for folks who don't know about you and your trajectory, would you please introduce yourself. Peter: Sure. I'm Peter Merholz, I work in — ostensibly — digital design, have for over 25 years. Started in CD-ROMs, so even pre-web. But cut my teeth on the web and through web design. Probably most notably, helped start a user experience consulting firm called Adaptive Path, which I helped lead from 2001 to 2011. For the last eight years, I've been some flavor of design executive, primarily working in-house. A few years ago, co-wrote a book called Org Design for Design Orgs, which is still the only book about what it… Kind of a playbook on building in-house design teams. Though I'm happy that Russ Unger and Chris Avore's book is coming out soon, so we will no longer be the only one on that subject. And a few months ago, decided to commit myself to independence and started a company. The URL is petermerholz.com, but the company name is Humanism At Scale, and it's my one-person consultancy dedicated to helping design organizations realize their potential and helping bolster and improve design leadership practices within organizations. Jorge: What is the link between the potential of organizations, humanism, and design? Peter: I see design as the Trojan horse for humanistic thinking within companies. Design is an obvious contributor of value, particularly in digital contexts and software contexts, and so companies are building design organizations in order to create these digital experiences. What they don't know they're getting with it is that design, when practiced fully, is situated within a humanistic frame that also includes social science and subjects like user research, it includes writing, rhetoric, composition, with things like content strategy… And so I see design as this lead… It's the tip of the spear, but what's behind it is a full kind of humanistic understanding that design can help bring into these companies. And the importance of that is companies have been so mechanistic, so analytical with their either kind of business orientations, MBA orientations, spreadsheet focuses, or engineering orientations. They've been so mechanistic that design has this opportunity to bring a humanistic balance into that conversation. Jorge: I had Andrea Mignolo as a guest in the podcast last year, and she talked about this subject as well, design as a way for organizations to map out possible futures, in distinction to using things like spreadsheets. Is that kind of what you're talking about here? Peter: That's definitely part of what I'm talking about. I mean, there's the obvious benefits or contributions of design in this business context, which is making a strategy concrete. We talked about that at Adaptive Path over 10 years ago, probably closer to 15 years ago, and, and IDEO has been talking about that. Tim Brown's been talking about that, right? It's very easy for executives to have different interpretations of bullet points on a PowerPoint slide and projections and spreadsheets, but it's really difficult to have different interpretations of sketches and prototypes of futures that those PowerPoint, bullet points and spreadsheets are actually inferring, right? Design can very quickly make concrete these abstract notions. And, so I think lead to better conversations about where an organization is headed. So, I think that's part of it. But I think, again, importantly, there's a whole body of thinking, of problem solving, of looking at the world that is rooted in the humanities, that is rooted in not just design and visual expression, but in language in social science, that can inform how businesses operate in and basically encourage them to operate better at least when I think would be better. Jorge: In your book and in your presentations on the subject, you often talk about this three-legged stool, where the three legs are, business, technology, and design. Is that the context in which you're talking about design here, as in supplementing the other two? Peter: I wouldn't say supplementing, but yes, balancing the other two. And that still makes it sound like design is one against two in that equation. But essentially, business and technical approaches tend to be analytical and reductive. And that's not bad in and of itself, but it's insufficient, particularly given the complexity of the things that we're building and how those things that we're building are situated within a society. And so the opportunity that design and humanism brings is providing a more generative, qualitative, creative, big picture frame and approach to problem-solving to balance that reductive, analytical, quantitative metrics-driven approach that has been so dominant for so long. Something I hadn't actually connected it with until just now as we're talking about, when you have that metrics-driven approach, that leads to businesses so focused on the numbers, they lose sight of the, frankly, societal impact of those numbers, right? So, you know, the big issue with social media is that everything's driving towards engagement. Because that's what they're measuring. And having lost sight of the societal impact of what happens when you have two and a half billion people that you're trying to engage, and not recognizing that the product of that engagement outside of the system is massive societal unrest. Jorge: Which has become evident after the fact, right? Peter: Right. Exactly. But if you had talked to or had any social scientists actively involved in that process, and you had a more humanistic approach involved in that process, you would have likely realized those potential outcomes in the process instead of simply after the fact. Jorge: I've worked mostly as a consultant in my career. I did spend some time internally in an organization, but most of my career I've spent as an external designer who is brought into an organization to help them through some of these challenges. And in that capacity, I've had the opportunity to interact with internal design teams. And one of the things I keep seeing in many of those organizations is that designers are working making either products or services better, but often at a very kind of granular level. And I'm bringing this up because I love what I'm hearing you say about design being kind of the organ of the organization that helps them think more systemically. But sometimes that can be at odds with the way that designers are actually working in organizations. And I'm wondering if you can speak a bit to that. Peter: I agree. By and large, most design in most organizations is seen as part of production, part of delivery. This is the challenge, but the opportunity, with the Trojan horse, right? Design is being brought into these organizations because you need designers to design the interfaces, essentially, of these digital experiences. And that is seen primarily in an output mode, right? The stuff that your users are interacting with, someone needs to design that, let's hire designers. And so it gets very much… I often use the double diamond when talking about this type of work and it's very much second diamond, very much on the execution side, the implementation side. Because that is the obvious value that design brings into business. And I think in many businesses, you're right, that's pretty much the limit of the value that design is bringing. What I would argue though, is there's this potential and more and more companies are expecting that potential of design to have some contribution “upstream.” I talk to companies all the time where they want design to have that seat at the table, to be a peer to product and engineering, to contribute strategically, to the conversation. And so the challenge there though, is often — this is part of the reason why design leadership is so important to me — is that I think we have a general kind of industry-wide shortcoming among our design leaders in terms of understanding the breadth of the influence they can wield and how to wield it. My concern is that many of those design leaders have come up in organizations where design was seen primarily as a production function. And so that's how they're approaching design leadership is just to make production better. And so, there's an opportunity, I believe where design leaders, one, can learn how their practices can have a broader influence. And then two, — and this is actually, I think, an even harder challenge — help those design leaders develop the confidence to assert their perspective at that more kind of executive or strategic level. Right? Because they're often a lone voice in a wilderness, right? That wilderness is heavily analytical, heavily mechanistic. And there are some designers saying, “We've got to listen to users,” or you know, “What about ethics?”, or whatever the thing is that the designer is talking about. And they're often that lone voice. And it can be hard to be that one to stand up and be the one that is — not necessarily getting along with whatever the dominant kind of cultural paradigm is — but I believe… Frankly, I believe it's kind of our duty. I think it's, in an unconscious way, these businesses have realized there's a power to this other way of thinking. That the current models aren't working, that the mechanistic model is running its course. And so, they're seeking other ways of working. So, then they bring in design, and when design starts doing its other way, the initial reaction is going to be one of pushing back because it's weird and uncertain and different. And it's up to the design leader then to manage that transition to help the business not react, not lash out, not reject out of hand, this new way of thinking and then also for that leader to help their team recognize its power and its potential in terms of influencing the organization. And it's really hard. Like, I think design leadership is probably, at least within a product development context, the hardest kind of leadership there is right now. It's easier to be an engineering leader or a product leader, or a data science leader, than it is to be a design leader because of this kind of contradiction or conflict of we want design, but design is different so we're pushing back on design, but then when we push back on it, we're unhappy because design isn't being interesting. Resolving that is this interesting challenge design leaders have. Jorge: You're validating how I see the arc of your career. We've known each other for a long time, and we met through the information architecture community, where — to summarize it really kind of unfairly and at a very high level — it's all about the design of the underlying structures of — at least when we met, at the stage that the discipline was in — was mostly focused on digital experiences. Peter: Web experiences. Jorge: Web experiences, yeah. Peter: Not even software or mobile. Jorge: It was pre-mobile. But that's what we were focused on, right? Like the structures that underlied these experiences. And my sense of your career is that there came a point in your own development where you had this insight that the structures… That you can work on the structure of the thing, or you can work on the structure of the thing that's going to produce the thing. Right? And that's where Org Design for Design Orgs I see basically as a book about the architecture of the organizations that define these architectures. Is that fair? Peter: Sure. Yeah. It's so… Conway's law. Conway's law is an interesting concept in this context, right? Conway's law is that any organization is going to deliver… Whatever it delivers will be a reflection of how it is organized. And oftentimes Conway's law is thought of not as a law, but as a thing to be aware of that you can work around. Right? So, if your company has organized in some way, you have business units, but when you present your org, when you present the company to the world, you don't want your customers to get caught up in the business units. Right? That's often… That has been a role for design to play in the past — web design in particular — is to create this kind of skin, this presentation layer, over the mess that is the company in its presentation to the customers. I actually first was writing about this like literally in 2002 or three there was an essay on the Adaptive Path website called Organization in the Way, where I was talking about how the reason websites don't make sense is because they basically reflect a company's organizational structure. And at that time, I thought the solution was, well, you can keep that organizational structure and the role of the design team is to understand the user and how they are approaching that company and again, create this presentation layer, this interface, this interpretation, so that the user can actually engage with the company meaningfully and not worry about how that company is structured. What I have since come to realize is that Conway's law is a law. That organizations will deliver their value, deliver their services, deliver their experiences, shaped directly by how they are organized. And yes, you might be able to paper over that for some brief period of time, launch a website design that, you know, in the past we would launch these kinds of task-based website designs because customers weren't looking at an enterprise software firm and thinking about the product modules, they had tasks they wanted to solve, so let's do a task-based architecture. And that would last maybe even a year or two, but eventually it would break down because that organizational structure has such power that it would reassert itself in how the company is presented to customers, regardless of whether or not it made sense to the customers. And so, what the true implication of Conway's law is, if you want to deliver a meaningful experience — a sensible experience — to your customers, you have to reorganize your company in a way that makes sense to your customers. That is the only way you're going to solve that problem. Jorge: Yeah. As you're talking about this, I'm thinking that I've experienced that very issue as well in projects where I've been brought in to help an organization, for example, rethink the way that their products are presented on their website. And it seems on the surface to be kind of an information architecture challenge; I've been hired to fix their navigation system or whatever. And then when you start digging into the problem, it turns out that the website and its nav structures are actually a MacGuffin for these conversations that are much more strategic and more challenging that people at a very high level in the organization — for whatever reason — have not been able to articulate except in the context of having something actionable like the website to serve as their meeting ground. Peter: Yeah. What was interesting about the web from an organizational perspective 20 years ago was it was the first time an entire company was being presented in a single unitary canvas, right? Before you would just deal with whatever channel that you were a part of and you know, whether there was a sales channel, a marketing channel, et cetera, and whichever part of the business that made sense to you, and you didn't have to worry about anything else. But with the web, all of that got placed on a single point of entry. And you know, we all dealt with trying to figure out how to design websites for these big companies that now their complexity was being exposed to the users, and the company had never had to deal with that before. I do think you're starting to see some companies grapple with this in a more meaningful sense. They're starting to change how they're organized. Shopify. I'm not a customer of theirs, I don't know if this has been good or bad, right? But Shopify for the longest time was basically organized functionally. You know, product team or an engineering team and a design team and marketing teams, and they would then deliver the products. And then at some point two or three years ago, they decided to — it's not radical — organize by products. But they also identified meaningful product distinctions. Products for merchants in one fashion, products for point of sale products, or whatever it is, right? The product line changed. And so that's now how they organize. They had to reorganize in order to make their company makes sense to their customers, possibly make their company makes sense internally as well. And so, I think you're seeing, you know… I'm doing some work with a bank and they have a set of… So, banks are funny, right? Because they're highly regulated, so that actually limits how they are able to organize. One of the things I've learned in working in financial services is that when a bank offers both checking and savings services as well as credit card services, those have to be treated by the bank as two independent organizations that really shouldn't be interacting with each other for legitimately good regulatory reasons. But as a customer, if you have a checking account with a bank and a credit card with the bank, it can be odd how it's not seamless in engagement. And you're like, “It's the same bank. Why can't I just do it?” And it turns out there's regulatory reasons for that. But what I'm starting to see with in this one bank I'm working with, they have this thing called “missions” and “value streams,” and they're organizing by, basically, tasks. You have a payments team and you have within that payments team; you have a value stream for moving money or a value stream for paying bills, and they're pulling people together in these teams. I'm doing work for a journalism company, news company, I guess you would call it. They talk about journalism; they don't just talk about news. I'm working with a news company, and they also have adopted missions. They have an engagement mission, a growth mission. And these missions are the means by which these companies are pulling together cross-functional teams, but providing an organization that now can make some sense to the customer, right? A customer isn't going to want to navigate the marketing team, the sales team, the product development team, et cetera, et cetera. But a customer, you know, if you are new to this company, you are working… You are basically… Your experience is managed by the growth team as they try to bring you into the fold. If you are an active user, you are now being handed off to the engagement team that keeps you engaged, it introduces you to new experiences, et cetera, et cetera. And so, these companies are looking at ways of creating, internally, at least, some new structures that are orthogonal to the kind of functional structures that better speak to customer experiences because they recognize kind of that Conway's law thing. If what matters is the customer's experience, you have to change your organization to meaningfully deliver on that customer experience. Jorge: I'm guessing that a considerable part of the people listening to us right now are not external consultants but are actually… I don't know if to use the word “affected,” or at least their work is influenced heavily by the type of structures that you're talking about. Peter: Hmm? Yes. Jorge: And I'm wondering if there's any advice or any insights that folks working in organizations can glean from this way of thinking about the work that could help them be more effective. Peter: “Yes” is the short answer. I think particularly designers have — which I'm assuming is the large part of your audience, designers and the design-adjacent — I think are particularly well-suited to have an impact on these internal structures because, as I was suggesting these internal structures should be influenced by an understanding of customers and the journeys they are on. And it's oftentimes and design team working with researchers that are tasked with understanding those customer journeys. And the opportunity, I think, for people internally, is to understand and map these customer journeys. So, do that work. And that, that's not hard to sell. Right? That's a pretty accepted practice now. Forrester's been talking about journey mapping for well over a decade. But I don't think every company has recognized the implications that I was referring to earlier, which is that that customer journey becomes a blueprint for how you reorganize your teams. Now, it might not be their reporting organization, right? That might maintain functional organization. So, you know, your designers will still report up to a Head of Design, and you might have 50 designers reporting into it as part of a single design team. But their day to day work, those designers are spending the bulk of their time and effort in these cross-functional teams that are organized by these journeys. And I think the opportunity is to help drive that organization, drive that conversation around, “Hey, we shouldn't be organized by either function…” Sometimes you get companies organized by platform, right? You have the mobile team versus the web team, you have an iOS team versus an Android tea m. Because that's not how people are experiencing it, right? You want to organize by the nature of how people are experiencing it so that you can deliver value across the customer journey. And you're seeing that more and more. I think we're still at very early days for it. But the opportunity for people listening who are in-house is, one, to know that this shift has occurred. It's not even occurring. The shift has occurred within many companies. And if in your organization, you're not operating in this kind of model that is… In this framework that is modeled after the customer journey, that is something to propose, that is something to continue to agitate for. And the customer journeys that you and your team are creating are that architecture for thinking through this and for organizing in this way. Jorge: Well, that's a great summary, I think. And, I think that those folks should reach out to you. Why don't you tell us where they can do that? Peter: Sure. I'm easy to find. My URL is petermerholz.com. That's my professional URL. I'm on Twitter at @peterme. Those are probably the two best places to find me. You can contact me through either means, through petermerholz.com or through @peterme, my DMs are open. So yeah, that's the easiest way to find me. Jorge: Great. And I believe the book has a website as well, right? Peter: Yes. The book has a website, orgdesignfordesignorgs.com, which also has with it a blog that we update in fits and starts. So, the book came out about three and a half years ago, and we've been blogging about ideas from the book, but as we've had new insights, new thinking, we've been blogging about those ideas. Improved, levels, frameworks, improved portfolio assessment tools, definitions of team leadership. As Kristen and I both do our work, and then teach a workshop based on this, we come up with things to write about. And so, the blog has all the most recent thinking when it comes to organizing your design organization. Jorge: Well, fantastic. I hope that folks visit the site and I'm sure they'll find valuable stuff there. Thank you, Peter, for being on the show. Peter: My pleasure. Thank you, Jorge, for having me.

The bad boys of the Bachelor recap podcast world are back to preview Season 24 of ABC's The Bachelor starring Peter "Not the Pro Bowler" Weber and to dole out the most prestigious preseason awards in reality tv podcasting! Leave 5 stars on Apple Podcasts! Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/anotherbachelorpodcast Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/anotherbachelorpodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/anotherbachelorpodcast Twitter:https://twitter.com/anotherbachpod Patreon: http://bit.ly/Patreon_AnotherPodcastNetwork Another Below Deck Podcast Apple Podcasts: http://bit.ly/AnotherBelowDeckPodcast_ Facebook Group: https://facebook.com/groups/AnotherBelowDeckPodcast Facebook Page: https://facebook.com/AnotherBelowDeckPodcast Instagram: https://instagram.com/anotherbelowdeckpodcast_  

On this episode of the "Dailicast Moment" host Chris Laning speaks with Peter Stewart, a long time radio presenter and host of the "28 Day Flash Briefing Briefing". Today, they talk about the different ways you can do your flash briefing.   TRANSCRIPT:   CHRIS: With your "Dailicast Moment" for today, I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Now I'm excited to have back my very first guest on "Dailicast Moment", Peter Stewart from the "28 Day Flash Briefing Briefing". Now, if you listened to us yesterday, we were talking about why we're both so jazzed about the whole dailicast flash briefing format and how it's very intimate and how it's just a small amount of information that you're dribbling to people each and every day. But today we're going to talk about how complicated or how uncomplicated it can be to put together a flash briefing. So Peter, welcome back to the "Dailicast Moment". PETER: Chris, it's great to be back with you. New Speaker: Now, yesterday you started to talk to us about what's involved in putting together a flash briefing. Do you mind going back into that and explaining to people again how easy or how difficult they want to make it? PETER: You know what? The easiest way for you to do a flash briefing is to set up an RSS feed, set it up, walk away, and then have Lexi , A-l-e-x-a actually read the content that you've already put onto your website. That's the easiest thing for you to do. And of course, that's what marketing is all about. Isn't it? Of making things easy for you? No, not really, because actually that's gonna be, it's gonna be easy for you. Yeah, but really bad experience for your listener. So I would suggest not doing that. I would suggest spending a little bit more time by actually reading the content of your dailicast or your flash briefing yourself. There's nothing, however good Lexi is or some of these other devices are, and they are getting better and better. None of them quite have the prosody of a human voice. None of them can change the speed, the tempo, the tone. Perhaps, build in a little bit of a pause for dramatic effect and that kind of thing that a human voice can do. Nothing can get quite excited about your new products that you're trying to explain to somebody or suddenly come down and say something in a much more kind of serious tone because you're being actually quite serious and thoughtful and cognizant about what it is that you are talking about. It's the humanity of the human voice. If that kind of makes sense. That brings over...that connects with people. We've been used to hearing other humans speak for Millennia and that is what is actually cutting through rather than the synthesized voice that Lexi may have when we read something out. It won't be received in the same kind of way as a human being delivering the same information would be. CHRIS: And that's the amazing thing. And you were talking about the Lexi version where she just is talking and I don't know if you've noticed recently, I have a couple that do that and it sounds like that they have made some changes just recently where there does seem to be a little bit more emotion going into it. It was kind of surprising to me at first. PETER: I think you are absolutely right! I noticed it about three or four days ago that I do believe her voice has changed and it has got a little bit better. I still think the Google voice is probably better still, but it just goes to show how things are moving on leaps and bounds at the moment and that technology is getting better and better and better. But you know what? You almost want to hear a stumble, a, a slight mistake, a hesitation that shows the humanity of a voice. Now sometimes as were shown with the Duplex last year, sometimes Google for example, is building in that hesitation into an automated voice, which actually sounds more human. But you know what a human does a better and actually can then connect better with another human being rather than have something that's too polished. CHRIS: I think we're much more experienced at doing that. You know? PETER: We've been doing it for a long time, haven't we? But of course the problem being that if you are reading from a script yourself, you've got to make sure that it doesn't sound as though you're reading from a script. You've got to be able to lift those words from a page. We've been talking naturally for thousands and thousands of years. What we haven't been doing naturally is actually reading words from a page, those squiggles on a computer screen or those squiggles on a bit of dried wood pulp. It takes a lot of effort. It takes a lot of training to be able to lift those words from page and actually make it sound as though they're just appearing in your head at that moment and you're passing them on conversationally. CHRIS: Now, one of the things that we have stressed and we stressed it yesterday and I constantly stress is brevity in doing this. We want to keep these short. On that note, I think I'm going to need to have you back again tomorrow because we're having such a great conversation, but I do want to keep these within our limit. Do you mind coming back? PETER: Not at all! I'm going to make some bullet points so I'm briefer tomorrow than I have been today, and I look forward to speaking with you again then. New Speaker: With your "Dailicast Moment" for today, I'm Chris Laning from NeighborhoodStage.com. Have a great day.

This week we examined the first sign that Jesus’ prophecy regarding the persecution of His followers would be fulfilled in the near future. The conflict began when the Sadducees interrupted Peter: Not only did they stop him from finishing his speech, they also took him, John, AND the formerly lame man into custody—holding them until... The post Acts 3:22-4:4 ~ The First Conflict appeared first on Laura L. Zielke.

This week we examined the first sign that Jesus’ prophecy regarding the persecution of His followers would be fulfilled in the near future. The conflict began when the Sadducees interrupted Peter: Not only did they stop him from finishing his speech, they also took him, John, AND the formerly lame man into custody—holding them until... The post Acts 3:22-4:4 ~ The First Conflict appeared first on Laura L. Zielke.

We start the show with a some BS-ing.Fact or Crap: 2 right this week.A little story about a snapping turtle.Mail Bag:One from Earl complimenting us on last weeks show.Three from Peter: (Not the one that was on the show last week.)1) Michelle Obama and Olive Garden team up.2) High School Principal Speech.3) Why our great grandparent's were happier?One from Chris: Thoughts on a previous show.One from Mike: Mom donates kidney to son, loses job for missing work.The Rest of the Show:Another all email show.