My Facebook friends have heard me complain a few times that I have apparently exceeded my brain’s capacity to keep track of people. At Google, I have worked with hundreds of people, and it’s entirely embarrassing when one of them sees me at lunch or elsewhere on the Google campus and says “Hi Eric!” and […]
Category: cognition
Expertise as exception handling
A few months ago, I wrote a post claiming that expertise was doing difficult tasks consistently and Rif challenged me on that. And I’ve been thinking about it over the past few months and have another model I’m going to throw out there: expertise as exception handling. One example of this is my experience as […]
How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer
Amazon link I picked this up from the library, as yet another in the recent series of books I’ve been reading that reinforce my own biases. Overall, I liked it – I knew most of the patterns in cognition that the book describes, but it summarized them nicely with good anecdotes. One standard model of […]
The Paradox of Self-Discipline
I was listening to the Fresh Air interview with Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide, and he mentioned an experiment that seems relevant to me right now. Lehrer describes the experiment in a Wall Street Journal article about New Year’s Resolutions: In one experiment, led by Baba Shiv at Stanford University, several dozen undergraduates […]
The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle
Book website, with excerpts Amazon link A coworker recommended this to me, and was even kind enough to lend it to me for the weekend. Coyle asks the question: where does talent come from? Is it nature (genetics) or nurture (environment/opportunity)? He started by visiting several talent hotbeds – the Russian tennis academy that spawned […]
Cognitive Theories of Corporations
One of the topics I want to think more about is organizational cognition aka how organizations think, and how to design an intelligent organization. For some reason, I was thinking about this today, and made a connection to standard theories of cognition that I hadn’t made before. Let’s start with Descartes’s view of the world: […]
Thinking about easy
I’ve noticed a fundamental distortion in how I view the world: If I know the answer or how to do something, it’s easy. If I don’t, it’s hard. This is a distortion because this worldview devalues my accumulated experience and knowledge. It’s funny because I know how long it took me to learn what I’ve […]
Making things easy
Why was the iPod successful? It didn’t have the most features – I once bought an Archos Jukebox with many options unavailable on the iPod at the time. It certainly wasn’t price – I bought a Dell DJ for $100 less than a comparable iPod in 2005. The design and user experience, the sleekness and […]
Mapping out Organizational Space
I really liked Tim O’Reilly’s post today about how companies like Google and WalMart are incorporating IT into their organizational DNA. O’Reilly’s post describes how those example companies are mapping out a new way of organizing people built around integrating IT into how the organization functions: Sensing, processing, and responding (based on pre-built models of […]
The Future of Organizations
Paul Graham’s latest essay claims that small organizations are the future: “But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size. …For the […]
