Intelligent organizations

Tobias Lehtipalo asked a really interesting question on the pmclinic list, which essentially was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization design? To review, Hawkins suggests that the brain is composed of a set of pattern-recognition layers. Each layer is trained to look for […]

Intelligence in Google world

In a comment on my strategic intuition post, Seppo asked the interesting question, “How will Google change the way we *think*?” In particular, he notes that sheer accumulation of facts once was a metric of intelligence, but in a world where Google is accessible from our pocket phones, mere facts don’t have the value they […]

Strategic Intuition and Expertise

On Monday night, I went to a talk by William Duggan, a Columbia business school professor who studies strategy, on a concept that he calls strategic intuition. Duggan has written a book on the subject, and has set up a blog to discuss the concept. Duggan started by discussing the differences between expert intuition and […]

Telling the story of our lives

This week’s New Yorker has an article describing Gordon Bell’s MyLifeBits project. I’ve heard about this project for years, and I’ve never understood what the point is. Collecting all of those pictures and articles and emails about one’s life just creates an overwhelming mass of data that can’t be processed effectively. It’s like the shoeboxes […]

Mastery

Following up on the previous post about discipline, I think another reason for discipline is that it’s necessary to achieve mastery. I was reminded of this while reading Artful Making, by Robert Austin and Lee Devin. They relate the process of management to the making of collaborative art, such as putting a play together. I’ll […]

Patterns and truth

But in Ender’s mind, madness. Thousands of competing contradictory impossible visions that make no sense at all because they can’t all fit together but they do fit together, he makes them fit together, this way today, that way tomorrow, as they’re needed. As if he can make a new idea-machine inside his head for every […]