Here is a bit from a superb interview with linguist Dennis Baron about the impact of new technologies on communication: Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we […]
I read Why Stock Markets Crash by Didier Sornette last year, and I thought it was a pretty good book. Sornette builds on the quantitative work of Benoit Mandelbrot to make models of market bubbles using non-linear dynamics. The basic idea is that bubbles are created when the expectations of people in a market become […]
Paul Krugman and Charlie Stross had a chat at the Worldcon in Montreal last week, and it’s fascinating from start to finish. The link to Charlie’s blog lets you either download audio of the talk, or it also leads to a transcript. There’s something to be said to just getting a couple of really smart, […]
Paul Graham wrote an insightful post recently talking about the differences between a Manager’s schedule and a Maker’s schedule. The basic idea is that managers divide their days into one hour blocks. So meetings can be fit into available one hour blocks. So can administration. If managers are lucky, when they have a bigger job […]
Amber made a very thoughtful comment on a post a couple of days ago, which I thought deserved more attention than it would get buried in the comments. So I’m posting it here, and also trying to answer a couple of her questions. She said: Tim, since your post on Crocs and their sudden obsolescence […]
I spent a lot of time in my talks this week discussing business model innovation. The main point is that this is often the most powerful form of innovation while also being one of the most overlooked. I ran across a great example of business model innovation today on Kevin Kelly’s blog. One of the […]
The NESTA Connect blog is probably one of the two best innovation blogs going, and Jonathan Crowley wrote a terrific post there today, which nicely summarises a lot of issues that we’ve been discussing here. He starts with this picture: which shows the spectrum of innovation. He then goes on to say that most people […]
In my previous incarnation as a blogger I mostly wrote about entertainment-related things. But one of the themes that quickly emerged was a discussion of the various projects that my cats got up to – including building a particle accelerator, starting a management consulting company, computer repair (see above) and making a trebuchet. I probably […]
About three years ago, Gerald Marion, a friend from the Brisbane office of Deloitte, introduced me to a book called the Alchemy of Growth. This is an interesting book and one of its main ideas is that there are three horizons for developing new business opportunities. Its a reasonably simple idea with Horizon 1 being […]
When I started university I thought I would be a math major. I had always been pretty good at math, and, just as importantly, I had always enjoyed it. Things went well reasonably well until the second semester, when we started working with n-dimensional matrices. Because I couldn’t visualise n dimensions, I had real problems […]
