I bought an iPod Shuffle before Christmas. I had actually planned to buy an iPod Nano, but when I walked into the Apple store, I compared the size of the two, and realized that the Shuffle was about one third the size. I like hearing albums in their entirety, but I decided to give the […]
Category: management
Learn and latch
On the plane ride to my parent’s place, I read the book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, by Grant McCracken. I’ve been reading McCracken’s blog, titled This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics for a while and really enjoy his commentary on the process of ethnology […]
Group flow
I was telling a friend about the Buffy singalong today and mentioned that one of the reasons it was so enjoyable was because everybody in the theater was a Buffy fanatic, or at least Buffy-fanatic-friendly. Because the show had sold out earlier in the week, only the fanatics had tickets. And that created a really […]
Competition
I went for a bike ride last Saturday. I rode on up to Central Park, and started cruising around the 6 mile loop there, which is closed to cars on the weekends so all I had to watch out for was slow-moving families. I’m cranking along, pedalling away so that I get a good workout. […]
Community Capital
I mentioned in the sharing post that community was built off of social capital. Then I wrote a whole follow-up post on community without ever addressing that hanging thread. Oops. Here’s where I was going with that. One of the reasons that humans have evolved such ludicrously large brains is that we need to be […]
Thoughts on Community
One of my long-time obsessions is trying to understand community. What makes a community work? How do communities form? Why do people fit in some communities and not others? It’s probably obvious that a large part of this obsession is me feeling like an oddly shaped Tetris piece in the social world. I try spinning […]
Transactional exchanges
I mentioned in my post about customer service that there are certain kinds of experiences which I call transactional. I’m not sure where I heard that term (or if I made it up) (Google makes transactional experiences look like a legal term), and my usage of it is probably not common based on Batman’s reaction […]
Customer service
I bought a new pair of boots last weekend. I’d been needing a new pair of shoes for a while, as my old sneakers were so worn down that it was actually painful to stand in them for any length of time. I decided to go see if I could find another pair of Ecco […]
Living in a viral world
Yesterday, Grant McCracken posted a link to a music video by a band called Ok Go. It’s an amazing video, where the four members of the band do an intricate dance involving eight treadmills. I’ve probably rewatched it five times, and it still consistently puts a smile on my face because it’s so endearingly goofy. […]
Taking the Blame
One of the threads running through my head recently is the importance of stepping up and taking responsibility. I’ve been noticing it in lots of places, in Seth Godin’s blog, in the book Lipstick on a Pig (where Torie Clarke’s first piece of advice is “Deliver bad news yourself, and when you screw up, say […]
