Over the past couple weeks, politics has come up twice in conversations with folks. This isn’t surprising with the Iowa caucus happening tomorrow and the primary process in full swing. But it is interesting that politics is starting to seep back into the national awareness and into my personal awareness. I burnt myself out on […]
Category: thoughts
Becoming a CIO
I took a great class this fall in the Technology Management program at Columbia. The official title of the class is “Behavioral Challenges in Technology Management”, but it should really be called “How to become a Chief Information Officer (CIO)”. The class is taught by Alan Morley, and is a class he designed to take […]
Personal vs. Social Responsibility
I’ve mostly been able to ignore the subprime mortgage mess. I don’t work in finance (although several of my classmates at Columbia are walking on eggshells), and my investments are mostly long term so the volatility in the markets doesn’t really concern me. But then I read the following paragraph in The Economist: The boldest […]
Peak, by Chip Conley
Amazon link Subtitled “How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”, this is a book applying the ideas of
Movies vs. TV
I need to take a break from doing class work regularly these days. Sometimes I get home from work and I’m worn out, and I need to turn off my brain for a couple hours before starting on class work for the evening. Sometimes I just want to distract myself for a bit before heading […]
Being anti-stealth
Charlie O’Donnell has been taking an anti-stealth approach to his new startup Path101, where he’s blogging everything that’s going on with the company, from meeting agendas to funding strategies. His strategy sparked a great thread on the nextNY mailing list about the advantages of being anti-stealth versus being secret. I contributed to the thread, and […]
Common Sense
Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy columnist at ESPN.com, has used the recurring trope of the Vice President of Common Sense which he describes in this column where he derides the choice of Mario Williams over Reggie Bush in the NFL draft: I’m becoming more and more convinced that every professional sports team needs to hire […]
Six Sigma and the Perils of Process
We had to read about Six Sigma process management last week for class. Six Sigma is a set of practices that allow companies to improve their processes towards satisfying customer needs, which is a laudable goal. The basic idea is that you have to first Define your goals, find ways to Measure your performance relative […]
Intracorporate communication
Why do organizational hierarchies exist? I was discussing this question with a friend a few weeks ago – I actually read The Origin of Wealth because she said that it had a good discussion of this question. The answer in the book, which I sort of agree with, is that hierarchies are actually an efficient […]
Change of view
When I first went to work for Applied Strategies, I didn’t really understand what they did. Applied Strategies (at that time) specialized in doing demand forecasting using decision analysis, which meant that we constructed mathematical models to estimate the size of a market for a drug or a vaccine. Our analysts used complicated decision trees, […]
