Afternoon Must-Read: Zeynep Tufkeci: How TED (Really) Works

…who will write about education policy on the high-traffic site: no need to be an expert in the topic, just an interest in the beat, and the ability to write really fast (part-time, of course while you juggle other, likely unrelated, jobs)…. There are, of course, advantages to acquiring breadth as well as depth, as one should, but it still remains true: to do something well, you need to specialize, over time, and most organizations run on the fuel that is people dedicated to taking care of their corner. These people are rarely the ones on stage, or highlighted as interesting people, or celebrated as glamorous. It’s the nurse who really understands preemie babies, the electrician who takes care of the aging air-conditioning in the building that nobody else knows how to fix, and the programmer that makes the creaky legacy scheduling database work….

It’s why you can walk onto a big stage without having looked at a mirror, because you know you can trust the person whose job it is to take care of this. And the opposite is the anxiety we feel in situations where institutions don’t function as well, and where one keeps having to acquire competencies just to take care of basic functions: most places on the planet. The inability to trust this division of labor is among the most tiring aspects of living in less developed countries…. And my talk? Oh, it was about whether digital technology is helping social movements scale up without building deep organizations, and hence hitting the big time without the capacity to weather the challenges. So, yeah. Sometimes, the real magic is in the details, the specialization, and a division of labor you can rely on.