Hello there! Welcome to Judy Knows, where I write about phenomena I find fascinating and topics that I feel more people should know about or understand. In my case, many of these passions lie at the intersection of business, technology, society and psychology. I really enjoy sharing my observations and enthusiasms with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, and after years and years of positive peer pressure, I’ve finally made the leap to put these passions online and share them with a wider audience.
I’m a business strategy professional, and have been for the last ten years. I was a management consultant at a global consultancy where I specialised in digital transformation and customer experience strategy. A few years ago, I made the transition to an in-house strategy role at a Fortune 500 company.
Why Judy Knows? My friends came up with it, to reflect how wide my interest set is. I’m a voracious consumer of content, and I am frequently called upon to curate recommendations or suggestions as I seem to have developed an extensive mental catalogue of a wide range of subjects over the years, ranging from the quotidian (food, travel, wellness, skincare) to the niche (vipassana, third wave coffee, and the "business of..." too many fields to count.)
Music was my first great love (I’m a classically trained pianist and piano teacher), and business has been the second. So it seems very fitting that my first piece of analysis is on the rise of BTS and what we can learn about the future of the fan-driven economy.
I am fluent in English, Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese. 以后，我也希望可以跟中文读者有更多的互动和交流。
Thanks for dropping by, and I look forward to connecting with you virtually. Send me a note at reachjudyknows AT <gmail> dot com or drop me a line on Twitter @_judyknows.
What to Expect from Judy Knows
Every single influencer / creator playbook will tell you that this is what you need to do to build an audience: Be consistent in the type of content you offer and the frequency in which you post. It’s important that people know what to expect from you and what value you can bring to them.
Friends have wanted me to write a blog, then start a YouTube channel, IG account or newsletter for years (after blogs fell out of favour...) but the advice above is exactly why I’ve struggled to create a meaningful online presence over the years: I literally have no idea what my niche is.
I get into rabbit holes all the time and I follow thousands of Instagram accounts and hundreds of blogs, YouTube channels and Twitter accounts. I read a handful of newspapers weekly and read dozens of magazine titles and their most interesting issues over the year in batches. I thought this was normal - a function of the explosion of content that is available in the Internet Age - and I just followed my interests just like everyone else.
Problem is - I have too many interests and it's not normal. Please believe me when I say that this isn’t meant to be a humble brag. With greater self-awareness I’ve realised that reading and consuming content is one of my coping mechanisms. In the grand scheme of addictions, having an information addiction is not necessarily a terrible or debilitating one to have. However, there are many days in which I fervently wish that I could narrow down my set of interests so I can actually become an expert in something and focus!
You see, the depth in which I pursue these interests is not exactly the “I like music and go to a few concerts a year and know by heart the back catalogue of a few of my favourite artists” level of interest that most people cite. (Maybe I shouldn’t have picked music as an example because I literally have professional diplomas in piano performance and music pedagogy.) For any topic, I want to know how it all works. So for music - besides all the academic music theory and performance that I trained in - I want to know how you produce music in the digital age, how you market records, what goes behind planning and executing a global tour, how do record labels make money, how do artists make money, what are the key trends, opportunities, and challenges facing the industry, etc. Case in point: the very first published piece on this site is a multi-part, multi-thousand word analysis of BTS because I just really, really wanted to figure out just why this group above all others finally broke the language barrier in mainstream American and global popular music.
Another example is when I got really fascinated with artificial intelligence, and learned a ton about the hardware and software advances that have been made in recent years. While I was visiting the Bay Area, a friend set up a tour of the Google Mountain View campus and brought along a colleague who’s an engineer for the company’s data centres to help chaperone our large group. We were chatting and I asked him what turned out to be highly specific questions about the infrastructure he worked on, and he asked me if I was in the industry. I was really taken aback by that comment as I felt like I had an amateur-level understanding of the topic and here was someone who was an actual expert who seemed to appreciate my questions.
All of this is to say: you’ll see me bounce around a ton of topics as I find my voice online. While I will likely always be a fan of BTS, please note that this isn’t a BTS stan blog so I will likely not create anything as in-depth about them going forward.
As Seth Godin preaches… I want to put in the work here and just keep writing. I don’t know where this will go, but I’m excited to find out.
