Here’s a video from the people that made the iPhone app Convert, showing all of the different versions that they tried: Convert Design Evolution from tap tap tap on Vimeo. There are a couple of things worth noting in this. First, they experimented a lot. They generated a ton of variety, all of which would […]
Atul Gawande from his most recent book, Better: The third requirement for success is ingenuity – thinking anew. Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from […]
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 […]
One of the key ideas in the business models research is that once a firm develops a successful business model, they tend to replicate it with all of their future innovations. This is Henry Chesbrough’s explanation for why Xerox was unable to successfully launch all the great inventions that came out of their Palo Alto […]
That’s me wearing my new iPod headphones. Strangely, I caught a fair bit of stick for wearing them today – including a relatively sarcastic ‘nice retro look’. I thought this was particularly interesting in light of a nice post I read this morning called The Myth of Evolutionary Ascent (found via John Wilkins’ blog). The […]
Jeffrey Pfeffer has written an interesting post summarising research by Boris Groysberg of Harvard (found via Felix Salmon). The research looks at the impact of banks hiring away star performers from competitors. Here is the description of the research: Grosyberg studied 1,052 stock analysts who worked for 28 U.S. investment banks over the period 1988 […]
I just want to pick up on a couple of ideas that I raised over the past week. The first was that of scheduling time so that you can pursue innovative activities, and the second talked about intersections between science fiction writing and economics. I thought of both of these things again when I ran […]
Now that preseason pro gridiron games have started up again, I’ve been thinking about whether or not I want to play in the game-picking pool I’ve participated in over the past few seasons. I’ve had some interesting results in the pool – I’ve done extremely well in the regular season, but horribly during the playoffs. […]
Chris Anderson from Wired is pretty much always worth reading. His article in the July issue on managing using concepts of abundance rather than scarcity is one of his more interesting recent pieces. He lays out a bit of the argument behind his latest book, Free (and you can download an audio version of the […]
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, […]
Garr Reynolds has a nice post today on his Presentation Zen blog called 10 Tips on How to Think Like a Designer. He includes a bunch of good ideas to incorporate into making good presentations. The one that resonates the most with me is the first one on the list: Embrace constraints. Constraints and limitations […]
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 […]
