One of the many lovely things about blogging is the way that people redirect your attention to things you’ve looked at before; calling attention to important insights that you missed the first time around or have simply forgotten. Back in May, the folks at SIGNAL VS. NOISE pointed to a passage in Christopher Alexander’s A [...]

Doing science is fundamentally a state of mind more than any particular set of tools or any particular domain of knowledge. How do you know when you’re doing science wrong? Easy: Read the comments on this post…   More in the same vein from xkcd. Fostering these attitudes is increasingly relevant in organizational settings. We’re awash in data [...]

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, Medina, John John Medina is a molecular biologist bent on sharing how what we know about the brain can help us be more effective in the world at large. His central argument is that there are simple, but very important, lessons to [...]

Trying to work something out with Windows Live Writer

All models are wrong. Some models are useful. George E.P. Box Although we’re constantly engaged in attempts to improve systems and organizations by introducing new practices and technologies, we still tend to do a mediocre job of dealing with the ensuing organizational changes. Part of our problem is that we tend to rely on very simplistic models [...]

Earlier this year, I reviewed Your Inner CEO, by Allan Cox. In the course of that, I’ve actually had the pleasure of meeting Allan and getting to know him. I think it was Ross Mayfield of SocialText who introduced us. Allan is an existence proof that nice guys can be very successful. One of the things [...]

Little Brother, Doctorow, Cory It may be time to get more serious about using PGP and learning about Tor. Little Brother takes us into a near-future version of San Francisco where Jack Bauer has clearly become the U.S. Attorney General. Marcus is a seventeen year-old high school student who likes to play video games, role [...]

The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, Roam, Dan One of the rules of thumb I learned in the early days of my consulting career was that your project wasn’t real until you had at least one napkin or placemat filed in your working papers with some sketch that captured [...]

I’m sure this will be making the rounds. It’s a good reminder about the value of failure. I found this courtesy of Brad Feld. Thanks for sharing. Famous Failures Great, inspiring video on failure. (thanks Scott).

One of the unexpected rewards of blogging is watching those that you’ve influenced in some way going off and succeeding in their own unique way. If for some odd reason you are not already following Jack’s work, you should correct that mistake immediately. Blogging for five years I have been blogging for five years now.  Amazing.  My [...]

[Cross posted at FASTforward] The phrase “technology for us” has been kicking around in my head for the past several months. At the FASTForward ‘08 conference, I took a first pass at articulating my thinking in a video interview with Jerry Michalski. Consider this my next attempt. I expect there will be more. Technology for Them Information systems [...]

[Cross posted at FASTforward] Clay Shirky’s got a new talk and he’s taking it on the road. It’s stimulating a good bit of thoughtful discussion around the web. Here’s a video version of his talk: There is embedded content here that you cannot see. Please open the post in a web browser to see this. Shirky has [...]

Alan Matsumura and I had an excellent conversation earlier this month about the work he is starting up at SilverTrain. Part of the discussion centered on the unexpected problems that you run into when doing BI/information analytics work. Suppose you work for Kraft. You’d like to know how many Oreos you sold last quarter. An [...]

Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy, Maister, David   David Maister has spent years advising professional service firms on the particular challenges of running their businesses. I first met David during my MBA days when I was a student in his course on the Management of Service Operations. I’ve come to [...]