Amazon link Based on my previous thoughts about the decline of Absolute Truth , it’s not surprising that I wanted to read a book that is subtitled “Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society”. Manjoo observes that we, the body politic, used to agree on what was happening and the problems we were facing, but […]
Information Rules, by Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian
Amazon link Google books link, which appears to have most of the book’s content available (not surprising as Hal Varian is Google’s Chief Economist). According to the preface, this book arose because these two economics professors were perplexed by complaints that “economics was not much use in today’s economy” even as they were getting hired […]
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. Sounds crazy, no? Almost like…a fiddler on the roof. No, wait, that’s something else. I’d heard about this project a few months ago, but Xemu linked to the trailer a couple weeks ago, which got me fanboy-ing again. Dude, a musical written by Joss Whedon, following in the tradition of the […]
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink
Amazon link Official book site My friend Wes recommended this book to me after my social capitalist post where I claimed that we were moving from a world defined by technology to one defined by social connections. Daniel Pink’s book describes a similar transition from an emphasis on left-brain thinking towards right-brain thinking. Pink starts […]
Vision, decisions and constraints
I have been thinking about the importance of having a vision recently, both in the context of companies and also my own life. The lessons of Built to Last continue to resonate with me, especially the message of “Preserve the core, but stimulate progress.” The companies that had long-term success were the ones that had […]
Living in the future
I live in the future. I don’t mean that in any sort of wacky time-travelling sci-fi sense, but in the sense implied by the William Gibson quip: “The future is already here; it’s just unevenly distributed.” I live in a world that’s a few years ahead of the mainstream. My friends were the geeks with […]
Intelligent Organizations for the Rest of Us
Beemer and Seppo (and Wes in a separate comment) had the same objection to yesterday’s post, which I’ll summarize as: “What you’re describing will only work for organizations with smart, motivated people which would probably be successful anyway. What about the rest of the organizations in the world who employ normal people?” Admittedly, I was […]
Intelligent organizations
Tobias Lehtipalo asked a really interesting question on the pmclinic list, which essentially was: Can we apply the principles described by Jeff Hawkins’s model of the brain in On Intelligence to organization design? To review, Hawkins suggests that the brain is composed of a set of pattern-recognition layers. Each layer is trained to look for […]
Social meaning
LP’s comment on my Social Objects post made me realize that I needed to clarify what I meant by “social”. My last post drew a bunch of new readers (thanks to Hugh Macleod’s Twitter) and I could see how my position might have been misinterpreted based on that post alone. The crux of the comment […]
Social objects
[author’s note: I wrote most of this post nine months ago, but never got around to finishing it. It seemed an appropriate companion to my recent series of “Social [X]” posts, so I added a couple paragraphs to the end and am posting it.] I was reading a gapingvoid post, and saw this wonderful quote […]
