Strategies in the news (May 30, 2023)

Staying on Top (a supplement to The Strategy Toolkit)

1.  Latest book on closing the strategy - execution gap…

“The One-Hour Strategy follows Martin, the new sales team lead at Waters & Flows, which attracted him because of their unique way of doing strategy.”*

* Kraaijenbrink, J., “The One-Hour Strategy:  Building a Company of Strategic Thinkers”, GreenLeaf (May 2023); (https://greenleafbookgroup.com/titles/the-one-hour-strategy)

The latest offering from Dutch strategy consultant Jeroen Kraaijenbrink.  We are sympathetic with his approach of everyone being a strategist (they just may not know it)…

2. This year’s Defence Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts?

“"I have no idea why it became so popular," said Mo Huabin, the man behind the fake enzyme coffees purporting to help anyone lose pounds fast. "It's actually just regular coffee, nothing special," he admitted in an interview with the FT.*

TikTok's spiralling global use and lax approach to policing content has dragged along a cottage industry of scammers in its home country who use the Chinese app to sell coffees and other dubious goods around the world.

Many of them organise and boast of their exploits on TikTok's sister app for China, Douyin, where the FT found Mo chronicling how he cuts together stolen clips of physicians to add credibility to the videos' weight loss claims.

"I do TikTok to rip people off," Mo said in a January video posted to Douyin. "My main tool is ecommerce in short videos and livestreams for the Americas." He told the FT that he was joking in the video and that he did not consider selling dubious goods as tricking people..”

* McMorrow, R. et al, “Cottage industry of Chinese scammers target TikTok,” Financial Times (April 24 2023)

https://www.ft.com/content/a6111b62-6589-44b7-ae6c-7a5f8daed82c

Deception is a common strategy across species, not just homo sapiens…

3.  Speaking of deception, have you heard about steganography?  Another of the unintended consequences of generative AI…

“Steganography, which is both an art and a science, differs from the better-known method of secret communication known as cryptography. Where cryptography intentionally conceals the content of a message, transforming it into a tangle of text or numbers, steganography conceals the fact that a secret exists at all…

“As with any method of covert communication, the challenge is how to make it perfectly secure, meaning neither a human nor a machine detector would suspect a message of hiding a secret. For steganography, this has long been a theoretical possibility, but it was deemed impossible to achieve with actual human communications…

“The advent of large language models such as ChatGPT suggests a different way forward. While it might be impossible to guarantee security for text created by humans, a new proof lays out for the first time how to achieve perfect security for steganography in machine-generated messages — whether they’re text, images, video or any other media. The authors also include a set of algorithms to produce secure messages, and they are working on ways to combine them with popular apps.”*

* Ornes, S., “Secret Messages Can Hide in AI-Generated Media,” Quanta Magazine, May 18 2023; (https://www.quantamagazine.org/secret-messages-can-hide-in-ai-generated-media-20230518/)

Cleverer and cleverer, as Sherlock Holmes would say…