I flew up to my parents’ house yesterday, and our plane came in late due to storms. Over the intercom, the flight attendant said that there was “a newlywed couple in row 14 trying to make a tight connection to their flight to Amsterdam, so if rows 1-13 can please let them through before getting […]
Buying pants
[Ed: We take a detour from our normal posts about cognition and management to talk about pants. Feel free to skip this post. Really. Just go on your way. It’s a waste of your time anyway. I’m just working out some clothing issues in public.] I recently posted on Twitter, which then posted as my […]
The Future of Organizations
Paul Graham’s latest essay claims that small organizations are the future: “But in the late twentieth century something changed. It turned out that economies of scale were not the only force at work. Particularly in technology, the increase in speed one could get from smaller groups started to trump the advantages of size. …For the […]
Situational vs. Dispositional Management
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 […]
Recording Mahler’s 8th Symphony
In case you were wondering why I didn’t update my blog much in November, it wasn’t just my new job responsibilities at Google. I had also chosen to sing in the San Francisco Symphony’s recording of Mahler’s 8th Symphony, which was recorded last weekend. So the rehearsals used a lot of my extra time and […]
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 […]
