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Bill's avatar

Re: Aircraft carriers:

Another very important distinction between the three aircraft carriers:

- HMS Queen Elizabeth & Prince of Wales are both diesel-powered.

- The French Navy's Charles De Gaulle is nuclear-powered.

That's an important difference.

Conventionally-powered carriers have limited range and time at sea as they must be constantly refueled.

Nuclear-powered carriers can stay out at sea, far away from their home ports for very long periods of time (supposedly 20 years!). That makes them basically a floating air force base that can station itself in position near battle zones for years, if need be.

To my knowledge, the Charles De Gaulle is the only non-US Navy nuclear powered aircraft carrier. No other navy has one. The US Navy has eleven!!

Bill

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Liberty's avatar

Very good point, wish I had thought to include it! Thank you 💚 🥃

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Igor Ranc's avatar

Re Podcasts: I feel like this can only work for people who like podcasts. I prefer reading and would really struggle if a company would run pods only.

Writing and pods come together well if you would offer transcripts, and recordings of writing, but the question is if this is possible and makes sense. It is probably a bit different format in any case. I would be interested in the stats of people listening to internal stuff.

We record a lot of meetings, but I never so far listened to any.

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Liberty's avatar

That's a good point, and I don't think I imagined it as being a replacement for everything else or the only way to do anything.

But I think it would be a very effective tool in the toolbox and probably additive to a lot of cultures, or could replace other less effective ways (and offer transcripts).

I don't think it should necessarily be a way to replace every memo and meeting, but sometimes you want to get some important ideas across to your team, and maybe making them listen to a great interview about it is a better way than trying to reformulate it yourself (not everybody is a great communicator/teacher) or give them a 350 page book that nobody will read.

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Igor Ranc's avatar

True, would be interesting to see some stats on adoption of podcasts vs books vs magazines/newspapers. I think there was something by Matthew Ball on this topic, but I did not read it?

Somehow I really can't get into podcasts. Maybe I am the only one.

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Liberty's avatar

In the population at large, I'm sure that it's easier for the average person to listen to a podcast or two than to read a book or long documents. Most people just don't read at all.

I suspect that investors are very very much outliers in this.

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Igor Ranc's avatar

I agree, most people just do not read.

Have been experiencing it a lot at work. Maybe we need to do youtube high-quality videos? :)

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Liberty's avatar

I have something in my notes that I'll write up later about the different medium (text -> audio -> video), it'll touch on that!

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Igor Ranc's avatar

I had a theory once... that writing is better than PPTs. I have failed to implement it in two different organisations already, hehe. It in fact depends on the way big boss wants it, if they like podcasts, guess what; if they like writing, guess what... When I am the big boss, we are gonna be writing 😅

https://eightyfour.substack.com/p/powerpoint-decision-making?s=w

This is still stuck with me, and I will never give up:

As former Amazon big boss Bill Carr explains, promoting his co-authored book Working Backwards, Amazon Web Services is a result of 18 months of thinking and writing:

Take AWS. It reached $10 billion in revenue in less than four years. But what's remarkable is that they didn't get there by forming a team, writing a lot of code, and then testing and iterating. In fact, it took more than 18 months before the engineers actually started to write code. Instead, they spent that time thinking deeply about the customers they were trying to serve and forming a clear vision for what AWS should be.

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Nick E.'s avatar

Honesty Pays 😇!!! [The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing.] Choose to believe that most people are good!

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Liberty's avatar

👍

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