I was talking with a friend tonight over dinner about the PhD that she is starting. One of the suggestions that I made was to get through the literature review and research design phase as quickly as possible. The reason for this is that data changes everything. PhD students share a common problem with inventors […]
Here is a must-watch video from Eli Pariser discussing some of the themes from his new book The Filter Bubble (reviewed well here by Cory Doctorow). It’s only 9 minutes, and it is well worth your time: Pariser’s main point is that the primary filters on the internet these days are algorithmic, and that these […]
To succeed at innovation, you need to be making a lot of little bets. What are little bets? According to Peter Sims in his excellent book called Little Bets, they are: A small, affordable action that anyone can take to discover and develop ideas. Here is a more complete explanation in an interview with Andrew […]
I’m still working my way through Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz. It’s a very interesting book, and nicely written. I’ll tell you more about it when I’m done. In th meantime, I’d like to share a fantastic quote from Schulz, which is in her review of Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the […]
What happens when the people that are supposed to be creative and innovative in your organisation are neither? I ran across an interesting quote from one of the people interviewed in the new book Herding Cats: Being Advice to Aspiring Academic and Research Leaders by Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies: The biggest thing that I […]
Innovation is the process of idea management. One of the critical steps to successful innovation is getting your idea to spread. Hugh MacLeod’s outstanding new book Evil Plans has a lot about how to get your ideas to spread more effectively. One of his tenets is that we should create random acts of traction. There […]
The first thing that I ever bought from the J. Peterman catalog was the Otavalo Mountain Shirt: I had discovered the Peterman catalog very early in its existence, and after getting a few in the mail, I finally bought the shirt. I quickly discovered that the quality of clothes from Peterman was very high, and […]
I was watching some MBA presentations this week, and they reminded me of a section of “On Exactitude in Science” by Jorge Luis Borges. In this short story, Borges describes a map the size of the world (From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999): . . . In that […]
In his thought-provoking new book Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand has this interesting passage: In Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000), he quotes William Blake – Without contraries is no progression” – and ventures that Blake came to that view from his immersion in London. “Wherever you go in the city,” Ackroyd observes, “you are […]
