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 […]
Global Brain, by Howard Bloom
Amazon link This book was recommended to me by Dav after he read my post on social networks and rejection. So I tossed it in my Amazon shopping cart, but didn’t end up ordering from Amazon until December, and didn’t read it until last week. Howard Bloom takes on the entire sweep of history (it’s […]
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 […]
Whee, links
Couple more quick links I found recently. Picasa is an image management software tool written by Google, of all people. I don’t remember where I saw a reference to it recently, but I just tried it out, and it’s absolutely wonderful. Instantaneous response to typical image manipulations, an “I’m feeling lucky!” button ala Google when […]
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 […]
Links
I’ve been using del.icio.us more, so you can always go there to check out what I’ve been finding interesting in my trawls through the web, but I wanted to call out a couple specifically. I thought Paul Graham’s latest essay was really interesting and either inspiring or depressing depending on my mood. Inspiring because he […]
Infinite games in childhood
A thought struck me this morning on my BART ride into work, in response to Carse’s talk. He describes infinite games as where the point of playing is to continue to play. Doesn’t this describe childhood? Over Christmas break, I was visiting some friends with kids, and I was playing Uno with their four year […]
Managers Not MBAs, by Henry Mintzberg
Amazon link I read about this book in the Economist, and the concept intrigued me. I’ve been in the business world long enough to develop the typical technologists’ disdain for MBAs and their lack of domain knowledge and emphasis on numbers that are probably meaningless. I was looking forward to reading this book to gain […]
Sources of Power, by Gary Klein
Amazon link Subtitled “How People Make Decisions”, this book attempts to explore the process of decision-making from a perspective far outside the normal business-world-oriented theories. In business school, people are taught that the right way to make a decision is to define the problem, generate a list of possible solutions, evaluate all of the possible […]
