🥁 The OffBeat #72: Lead Sheet | Leadership Digest
Something to read, something to think about, something else
This is The OffBeat, from jazz drummer, two-decade marketing leader, and mom of two Allison Stadd: music-inspired answers for your leadership challenges, like music-inspired rules to thrive at work.
Lead Sheet (f.k.a. Half Note) is The OffBeat’s every-other-week roundup of links, recs, and quotes. Like a lead sheet in music (just the essentials: melody, harmony, lyrics), it always has something to read, something to think about, and something else—all within the themes of leadership cues from music and personal/professional balance.
Something to read:
How to start collecting art without breaking the bank
Silicon Valley’s obsession with AI looks a lot like religion
Rise of an anti-algorithm music counterculture
Barnes & Noble is making a comeback
What we lose when optimizing community
Inside a neurodiverse-friendly office
Something to think about:
“Cyrus once read an anthropologist who wrote about how the first artifact of civilization wasn’t a hammer or arrowhead, but a human femur—discovered in Madagascar—that showed signs of having healed from a bad fracture. In the animal world, a broken leg meant you starved, so a healed femur meant that some human had supported another’s long recovery, fed them, cleaned the wound. And thus, the author argued, began civilization. Augured not by an instrument of murder, but by a fracture bound, a bit of food brought back for another. It was an attractive idea.” — Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
Something else:
On my mind as we kick off the second month of the year: taking stock of my personal tech stack. Below, the current tools and technologies making things tick over here:
Notes, ideas, lists, visioning: iPhone Notes, Google Docs, Pinterest, physical notebook & pen
Research and inspiration: Pinterest, YouTube, Feedly, Apple Podcasts, Substack, Claude, ChatGPT
Cloud storage: Amazon (ugh) for photos/videos, Google Drive for everything else
Personal CRM: Folk
Passwords: 1Password
Personal website: Squarespace
Productivity: Things for short-term and long-term to-do’s, iPhone Reminders for shopping and grocery lists, Adobe Scan for scanning documents
Communication: Gmail, Messages, WhatsApp
Calendar: Google Calendar, Skylight for digital family calendar
Habit tracking: Plant Nanny for water consumption
Music and entertainment: Spotify, Sonos, GoodReads, Bookshop, Apple Podcasts, NYT Games
Mental and physical health: Calm, Melissa Wood Health
Eating out / ordering in: Shipt, DoorDash, Resy, OpenTable
Finances: Tiller, Venmo
For double the reading recommendations, including speakeasies as the newest office design trend (🥴) and investing in “we” over “me,” plus—NEW for 2025!—some things to listen to / watch, keep reading.