Taking the Blame

One of the threads running through my head recently is the importance of stepping up and taking responsibility. I’ve been noticing it in lots of places, in Seth Godin’s blog, in the book Lipstick on a Pig (where Torie Clarke’s first piece of advice is “Deliver bad news yourself, and when you screw up, say […]

Seizing The Moment

I have a series of posts that are all linked in some way in my head, and are all in various states of incompletion. I’m going to dive right in and start posting and hope that it comes together as I go along. Or maybe I’ll just confuse people. Last month, at the Yankees game, […]

NextNY PitchCamp

After enjoying my last outing with them, I went to another nextNY event this evening. This one was PitchCamp. Keshava recruited several investors and entrepreneurs (including David S. Rose, the pitch coach written up in BusinessWeek) to serve as coaches while volunteers tried their pitches. The first hour was three companies doing 2-3 minute elevator […]

Reinforcing patterns

Somewhat following in the footsteps of my posts about persistent patterns, one thing I noticed in the news reports of the terrorist plot was this line: “Teams of at least two or three men were assigned to each flight, the schedules for which they had researched on the Internet, the official said.” Is there anybody […]

Persistent Patterns

It’s been way too long since my last pretentious philosophical post. I’ve got about three half-written, but none of them have really come together yet. But tonight, I’m posting something, dammit! I actually want to revisit my completely uninformed picture of what goes on in our brain. Long-time readers may remember my series of cognitive […]

The same people

Adrian was in town, so he called an impromptu Power Dinner of the New York TEPs. Mim and Qwidjibo and I showed up, as did a couple of Adrian’s other friends. First of all, it was at Hallo Berlin, which may have just moved to the top of my favorite restaurants in Manhattan. Awesome German […]

Tracing social connections

So far, my thoughts on applications for the ideas from Reassembling the Social have included management, marketing, and entrepreneurship. One more post on this subject, and then I think I’ll be ready on to move on to a new topic. The last topic is that of explicitly social connections, of friends. Friendship is a tricky […]

Leading a dynamic life

At the end of my last post, I wondered why people tend to believe that institutions are just there. Beemer’s answer was that “Maybe because for the first 18 years of our lives, they are? Childhood is dominated by relationships that are dictated and maintained by external systems, mostly “family” and “school”.” This makes a […]

Collective Marketing

As is becoming usual (yay!), check out the comments on my last post for some interesting followup. So the last post could have been titled “Managing the Collective”, and talked about how to connect Latour’s wacky ideas about actor-network theory with the world of corporate management. Today I want to spend some time connecting those […]

Creating the Collective

First of all, check out the comments on yesterday’s post, where Beemer refines what I’m talking about and comes up with a great example to illustrate it. Today’s topic: what the heck does any of this French wacky social theory have to do with anything real? I’ll lead off with a couple Latour quotes: “an […]