Amazon link I’m not sure where I originally heard about this book, but given my preference for rapid prototyping in my work, I thought it would be interesting. Thomke is a Harvard Business School professor who’s spent the last ten years studying how experimentation is integrated into and leveraged by organizations. This book is his […]
Category: thoughts
Followup to Trust, but Verify
I wanted to pursue a couple things I mentioned in my last post. I speculated that customer enthusiasm might be a sufficient factor in making decisions in my P.S. to that post. But I was thinking about it this morning and realized that there are some great counterexamples to that. Apple has a nearly cult-like […]
Trust, but Verify
After hearing me talk about how much I enjoyed Gary Klein’s Sources of Power, a friend of mine forwarded me this Harvard Business Review article, titled Don’t Trust Your Gut, by Eric Bonabeau. Bonabeau takes on the recent books promoting the use of intuition in business, calling out Gary Klein specifically, and attempts to make […]
The Internet as a Global Brain
This is a pretty minor observation, but while reading Gonzo Marketing on BART this morning, my brain cross-pollinated some of Christopher Locke’s ideas on micromarkets with the ideas of Global Brain, and realized that the World Wide Web maps very well to Howard Bloom’s conception of a Global Brain. Let’s review the elements that Bloom […]
Gonzo Marketing, by Christopher Locke
Amazon link Subtitled “Winning through Worst Practices”, this book caught my eye when poking around the clearance section of a bookstore. Plus it referred to “gonzo” marketing, and since I’m a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo journalism, I picked it up. Christopher Locke was one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, which […]
Attention management system
In light of my interest in social software, I’m finally opening up a new category in my blog for it, to separate it out from the people rants. Of course, this first post isn’t actually about social software, except for possibly a bit at the very end. Part of what I’m struggling with right now […]
In Search of Stupidity, by Merrill R. Chapman
Amazon link I picked this book up after reading the interesting foreword that Joel Spolsky wrote for it. Chapman’s insight was that several of the companies lauded for having a great corporate culture in the famous business book In Search of Excellence had fallen off the face of the planet within a few years. From […]
Launch chicken
A friend of mine at Signature shared the theory of Launch Chicken with me. Say you’re in a project with a tight schedule with several different areas contributing to its success, say a product launch. Let’s say that you know that the area you are responsible for is not going to make the launch. You’re […]
Trading Randy Moss
After reading this Pro Football Weekly article on possible trade scenarios for Randy Moss of the Minnesota Vikings, I wrote back to the author with one of my own. And, well, since I have a blog, I’ll share it here. On the off chance it actually happens, it’d be cool to say that I called […]
Cognitive effort
I bought a bed last weekend, and it was delivered two days ago. Yes, I finally decided that I should stop sleeping on the futon that I had bought used in grad school nine years ago. And two nights of sleeping on the nice new bed has made me go “Wow! Why did it take […]
