💡THE BIG IDEA
Of the more than 50 field guides we published this year, here were your favorites: World vs. coronavirus, Decision making, What Gen Z wants, The virtual conference reboot, and Netflix’s next stage.
✍ THE DETAILS
We’re ending the year with a look back at the field guides that you, our members, most enjoyed in 2020. And we’ve even created a quick quiz so you can test your knowledge on the topics in those five guides. As a reminder, the entire field guide archive is available to you as a Quartz member.
Before the coronavirus lockdowns had spread beyond Wuhan, we’d planned to end March with a field guide on the dangers of overtourism. Suddenly, that seemed like the least urgent problem of 2020. So, we scrambled to cover the spread of the pandemic instead. The result was World vs. coronavirus, a series of reported essays grappling with the implications of Covid-19 in real time. It has been one of our most consistently well-read field guides of the year.
Most read: What the workplace stands to gain and lose in a post-coronavirus world
If you liked this guide, check out: The coronavirus living briefing
Here are the textbook steps in a “rational” decision-making process:
- Define the problem
- Identify the criteria
- Weigh the criteria
- Generate alternatives
- Rate each alternative on each criteria
- Compute the optimal decision
If only decision making in the real world were so simple. Instead, we’re biased, overconfident, and haunted by regret, as this guide explores. Understanding some of the shortcuts our brains take, and the external factors impacting us, can help us make more thoughtful and strategic choices.
Most read: What a study of video games can tell us about being better decision makers
If you liked this guide, check out: An economist’s rule for making tough life decisions
“Today’s young people have an unprecedented amount of power over the many companies hoping to court them,” Quartz’s Sarah Todd writes. They’re “using their power to push companies forward on big social concerns such as the environment and gender nonconformity.”
Part of what makes this generation different? They’ve never known life without smartphones.
Most read: Gen Z consumers are making companies bend to their will
If you liked this guide, check out: UK millennials will inherit way more of their wealth than the generations before them
Can you remember the last work event you went to IRL? Neither can we. This year saw the massive conference industry shift online, as speakers learned to be more engaging over Zoom, and the rest of us tried to remember to unmute when we wanted to say something.
Most read: The new experimental landscape of virtual conferences
If you liked this guide, check out: CEOs and executives can’t remember to unmute either
The pioneer of streaming video had a huge year—and more competition than ever. Can it stay ahead of its peers in 2021?
Most read: Netflix has no choice but to disrupt the entertainment business, again
If you liked this guide, check out: Why Asia is now Netflix’s hottest market
Which of these five guides did you like the most?
🤫 The virtual conference reboot
And don’t forget to take the quiz.
Finally, here are five more guides that members enjoyed in 2020:
Best wishes for a healthy and restful end to 2020, and send us an email to let us know what you’d like to see us cover in the new year: members@qz.com.