Last night, I attended the Mountain View Linchpin Meetup, inspired by Seth Godin’s blog post (speaking of which, I need to review Godin’s book Linchpin at some point). Spending an evening with a group of people following their passion inspired me to take a swing at restarting this blog yet again. Today’s topic – the […]
Category: thoughts
Management Innovation Exchange
The Management Innovation Exchange (aka MIX) looks like an interesting project. It’s a collaboration between McKinsey, London Business School and a couple companies like Dell, with the idea being to open source ideas about management. It’s unclear yet whether it will attract a critical mass of community to discuss ideas (so far, the curation looks […]
Trade-Off, by Kevin Maney
Amazon link Trade-Off is a book which explores a simple, but useful, way to frame the world. Kevin Maney plots products along two dimensions, fidelity and convenience, and then spends the rest of the book discussing how products end up in different places on that graph, from the “fidelity belly” to the “fidelity mirage” Fidelity […]
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 […]
Chief Culture Officer, by Grant McCracken
Amazon link I have been a fan of Grant McCracken’s for several years now, so I was eagerly awaiting his new book, Chief Culture Officer. Note that I may be slightly biased in this review, as Grant mentions me in the book as a potential CCO candidate. Chief Culture Officer is McCracken’s manifesto of how […]
NurtureShock, by Po Bronson and Ashley Merriman
Book website Amazon link I’ve liked Po Bronson’s other books, like What should I do with my life?. I also really liked his New York magazine article called The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids, which described Carol Dweck’s research into the fixed vs. growth mindset of children, and what a tremendous difference it […]
Coaching and feedback
In my last post, I talked about getting the reps to improve oneself on desired skills. But it’s difficult to make the time for practice, especially for deliberate practice where we are always dancing on the edge of failure. And I think that’s where I think Coyle’s observation that coaching is an integral part of […]
Getting the reps
Seen on Twitter: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle Both Drive and The Talent Code make the same point: Becoming a master isn’t about natural talent or improbable achievements – it’s about getting a little bit better every day, and practicing until what is now […]
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 […]
