The Society of Biomolecular Sciences (SBS) puts on one of the most important conferences in the pharmaceutical industry. When I was working on CellKey, it was the conference where the instrument was launched and where most of the papers on CellKey were presented. So it was quite an honor to be informed that the CellKey […]
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 […]
The Origin of Wealth, by Eric D. Beinhocker
Amazon link Subtitled “Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics”, this book is a weird mishmash of several subjects. It starts with a critique of neoclassical economics, moves on to a review of complexity theory and evolution, reframes economics as an evolutionary competition among business models, and then finishes by applying some of these […]
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, […]
Is an elite university worth it?
Paul Graham makes the provocative claim that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” He’s been evaluating startup founders as part of his Y Combinator program for a few years now, and “what we’ve found is that the variation between schools is so much smaller than the variation between individuals […]
Shared experience and community
I spent last weekend up in Boston hanging out with TEPs, most of whom were younger folks that had joined TEP years after I had left Boston. And yet I felt reasonably at home with them. I continue to be fascinated by these questions of what makes a community and how community is linked to […]
Checking in
Gosh, it’s been ten days since I last posted. I’ve had lots of scattered ideas, but haven’t quite had the focus to pull any of them together into a full post. Things have been busy at work as we prepare for the release of FogBugz 6, the newest version of our main product, so that’s […]
Community media usage
As usual, good comments on my last post that you should read. Anca picked up on my last point that one might be able to design the direction a community takes by designing the media interaction spaces for that community. But before trying to design something, I think it’s useful to observe my current and […]
