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 […]
Category: cognition
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 […]
Situational vs. Dispositional Management
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 […]
Spreading Ideas and Framing
Noah Brier wrote an interesting post yesterday about how certain ideas spread virally even when people disagree with them. His examples include Sarah Palin or Wired’s “Blogging is dead” article, where the blogosphere is buzzing about how bad an idea something is, but are still spreading the original idea far beyond its original audience because […]
Convergence08
Over the weekend, I attended the Convergence08 unconference, which focused on future technologies like biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, etc. I had to miss the Saturday morning sessions, as I had a chorus rehearsal for this week’s Mahler concerts, but I was there on Saturday afternoon and most of the day Sunday. The first session I […]
Time Perspectives of Philip Zimbardo
One of the great advantages of working at Google is that famous people want to come visit. That’s how I got to see Ferran Adria a few weeks ago. Yesterday, it was John Hodgman and Jonathan Coulton. Later this week is Chip Kidd. You get the point. But what’s even nicer is that they record […]
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 […]
Switching Costs
Earlier this week I switched my RSS reader from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’d been meaning to check out Google Reader for months, if not years, but had never gotten around to it, as Bloglines was serving me well enough for what I needed, and I’d gotten used to its quirks. But over the past […]
Self Haxx0ring
As noted in my last post, this is my first week as an employee of Google. I’m trying to get up to speed on the types of things that I will be doing, which meant spending most of today learning about the ad system, revenue forecasting models, how the Google backend works, etc. Unsurprisingly, there’s […]
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink
Amazon link Official book site My friend Wes recommended this book to me after my social capitalist post where I claimed that we were moving from a world defined by technology to one defined by social connections. Daniel Pink’s book describes a similar transition from an emphasis on left-brain thinking towards right-brain thinking. Pink starts […]