Yesterday’s post on branding actually started because I have been thinking extensively about personal branding throughout my just-completed job search. Looking for a job entails trying to find a plausible intersection between one’s background and skills, one’s interests and career aspirations, and what a company needs. For a generalist like me, this gets particularly interesting […]
Category: people
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 […]
Living in the future
I live in the future. I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with […]
Social meaning
LP’s comment on my Social Objects post made me realize that I needed to clarify what I meant by “social”. My last post drew a bunch of new readers (thanks to Hugh Macleod’s Twitter) and I could see how my position might have been misinterpreted based on that post alone. The crux of the comment […]
Social objects
[author’s note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of “Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.] I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote […]
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 […]
Intelligence and non-zero-sum thinking
Yesterday was the last class of my master’s program at Columbia (I have one more final next week, but no more class sessions). A bunch of us technology management students went out for drinks afterwards in celebration, and ran into another group of students from our marketing class. And it was interesting chatting with them […]
Unpacking “it’s complicated”
A friend recently sent me an update email with the line: She is my “it’s complicated” on Facebook. [updated to add: the friend in question cites xkcd as his inspiration] I think this quote is wonderfully transcendent in capturing the zeitgeist, so much so that I’m going to spend a blog post unpacking it. Grant […]
Theories of life
I’ve been mentioning several theories to several different people recently and decided it’s time to put them all on my blog so they are easy to reference. Some are prescriptive, some are descriptive, but I find all of them useful in certain situations. The Crusher Theory Michael “Crusher” Ernst once explained this theory to me […]
