Amazon link I really enjoyed Daniel Coyle’s book The Talent Code, so when I saw he had written a follow-up book on organizational culture, I picked it up from the library. Subtitled “The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups”, Coyle investigates successful groups from the Navy SEALs to the San Antonio Spurs to a band of […]
Category: community
Give and Take, by Adam Grant
Amazon link Book website Adam Grant’s TED talk on the subject Vince Lombardi, the famous football coach for whom the Super Bowl trophy is named, once said that “Nice guys finish last”. Adam Grant did a study to see how successful people were who habitually sacrificed themselves for others…and confirmed that a disproportionate number of […]
Overlap!
I’ve mentioned Overlap several times in this blog over the last five years, and I’ve always meant to do a more in-depth post about it, and it’s finally time to do that. The occasion of this post is that I attended my fifth Overlap retreat over Memorial Day weekend, and not only did I attend, […]
Reflecting on the Talia Jane brouhaha
I’m summarizing my comments from various social media threads on Talia Jane’s letter to the Yelp CEO and the responses like this one, and reposting them here for later findability. I have complicated feelings about this letter, given that I have been that ranting employee – not doing it publicly (even back when my blog […]
Repurposing the college experience
I was having coffee with the always fascinating Grant McCracken last week, and we got into a digression on the function of the university in the world today (part of what I love about talking to Grant is that our conversations end up in such interesting places). It stemmed from a discussion about whether my […]
Corporate culture as illustrated by monkeys
I was talking to a friend tonight about organizational culture. She was wondering about how one can institutionalize or productize culture. And I laughed out loud. And she asked me why I thought it was so funny. So I thought for a second, and told the story of the five monkeys. The story is that […]
Maximizing collisionability
Last night, Tony Hsieh of zappos.com spoke at the Long Now on the topic of Helping Revitalize a City. He described Downtown Project, which is the company he designed to create a thriving community (tech, art, fashion, family) in downtown Las Vegas. As he discussed the project, he brought up a great concept that I […]
The world is small. Except when it isn’t.
Golly. Three months without posting. But things have calmed down at work, I took a few days off for Burning Man two weekends ago, and I slept most of this past weekend, and, hey, look, I have things to say again. Well, actually, I’ve had things to say for months, but not the energy to […]
Personization
I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting […]
Language Games
My last post on faking it engendered some discussion that made it clear I hadn’t communicated my point very clearly. To paraphrase one uncharitable commenter, one interpretation is that I’m looking for ways to justify my tendencies towards self-aggrandizing attention-seeking egotism. And there’s certainly an element of that, as I thought I covered in that […]
