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 […]
Category: thoughts
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 […]
Age of Conversation 2 is now out
A few months ago, I volunteered to contribute an essay to a compendium called “The Age of Conversation 2”. The first “Age of Conversation” book resulted after two editors collected submissions on the topic of conversation from one hundred bloggers and self-published the result at lulu.com. The second book, in which my essay appears, is […]
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 […]
Story Metrics
So I want to build on my last two posts (which both have excellent comments that you should check out, even though I haven’t managed to be coherent enough this week yet to respond). In particular, if I treat everything as a story and I’m asking what the purpose of a design is, the obvious […]
What is the purpose of your design?
Ferran Adria (yes, that Ferran Adria) stopped by Google today while in town for his book tour promoting A Day at elBulli. He spent most of the hour talking about innovation and his approach for trying to invent a new culinary language within the universal language of cuisine, with pictures of some amazing nature-inspired desserts, […]
Everything is a Story
I’ve been thinking on and off about this post for weeks, and it’s not coming together, so I’m just going to write up what I have and see what happens. Or at least put it up to instigate comments that will help me clarify what I mean (as the comments on my “Faking it” post […]
