In my post about Philip Zimbardo’s work, I mentioned the concepts of situational vs. dispositional tendencies. One might see these as being obscure cognitive constructs. However, a recent situation made me realize that beliefs about these tendencies have direct consequences on management styles. So let’s dig into this some more by starting with a description […]
Category: management
Organizational Cognition
Over the past seven weeks (good golly, where does the time go?) at Google, I’ve noticed a funny habit of mine. Whenever I overhear a conversation involving something that is related to my team’s work, I drop whatever I’m working on and wander over to listen in. Now, one might guess this is due to […]
What is the purpose of your design?
Ferran Adria (yes, that Ferran Adria) stopped by Google today while in town for his book tour promoting A Day at elBulli. He spent most of the hour talking about innovation and his approach for trying to invent a new culinary language within the universal language of cuisine, with pictures of some amazing nature-inspired desserts, […]
Meeting Dynamics
As I am learning the lay of the land at Google, I’ve been initiating one-on-one meetings with people around me so that I can learn what they do and gain some different perspectives on what my group produces. I wrote up my notes after my meeting with one coworker, and after he reviewed what I […]
Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian
Amazon link Google books link, which appears to have most of the book’s content available (not surprising as Hal Varian is Google’s Chief Economist). According to the preface, this book arose because these two economics professors were perplexed by complaints that “economics was not much use in today’s economy” even as they were getting hired […]
Vision, decisions and constraints
I have been thinking about the importance of having a vision recently, both in the context of companies and also my own life. The lessons of Built to Last continue to resonate with me, especially the message of “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress.” The companies that had long-term success were the ones that had […]
Intelligent Organizations for the Rest of Us
Beemer and Seppo (and Wes in a separate comment) had the same objection to yesterday’s post, which I’ll summarize as: “What you’re describing will only work for organizations with smart, motivated people which would probably be successful anyway. What about the rest of the organizations in the world who employ normal people?” Admittedly, I was […]
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 […]
Social technologies
Picking up on yesterday’s post and Seppo’s comment, another topic that has been coming up in my conversations is the idea of “social technology”. This doesn’t mean social software, where technology is applied for social purposes like Facebook or LinkedIn, but instead the idea of creating better social patterns that we can use. In this […]
Social capitalist
I’ve been playing with this idea for a few weeks, and it’s not quite coming together, so I’m going to ramble for a bit and see whether it starts to solidify as I go. It started with a quip I made to a friend last month where I claimed that the winners of the last […]
