Month: July 2009
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The Purpose of Conferences
Fifteen years ago, conferences were a place to do two things: meeting new people and get information that you could really only get at the conference. Today, almost all of the information can be gotten elsewhere, the only benefit is being able to get to know people – to reconnect in person with people you…
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Leading Is Initiating
In my experience, there are many people who assume that in order to lead, they need to know all the answers or be more experienced than the people they are leading. As a result, they are content to do the things they are asked, and nothing further. They don’t feel they bear any responsibility for…
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The Benefits of Dwelling
Most ideas can be rather simply put. Cliff notes have been truncating books for ages. Book reviews often summarize a book sufficiently that you can have an intelligent sounding conversation about the ideas presented with your colleagues. Unfortunately, ideas represented in simple forms rarely translate into change: Change of action, change of understanding, change of perception.…
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The Irrepressible Need To Correct
We all do it. Your friend says, “Can you believe that we haven’t seen Bob in 4 weeks?” Contemplating this, your brain calculates that really it’s only been 3 weeks and 5 days, so rather than simply agreeing with the over all point your friend was making –“Hey, it’s been a long time” — you…
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A New Management Book
One of my friends and I have an ongoing joke about writing the next new management book. What we’ll do is simply rehash a mix of 4 or 5 other business books, then find anecdotal examples showing that all successful companies have followed our theory. It’ll be the next big seller. Is rehashing things good?…
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The Paradox of Choice
The Paradox of Choice is an interesting book, that I think is often overlooked. The premise of the book is actually, that making choices comes with a consequence and while we wouldn’t necessarily give up any particular choice, the total number of choices that we are forced to make is at the very least taxing…
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Scarcity and Excellence
As we continue to progress deeper into a world where things that used to be scarce (technological gadgets, entertainment sources, varieties of food products, etc), are becoming abundant, one thing that is not becoming abundant is excellence. For every iPod, there are hundreds of mp3 player’s you’ll never heard about. For every Facebook, there are…
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The Inertia of Uncertainty
Inertia (n) – Resistance or disinclination to motion, action, or change (American Heritage Dictionary) Someone once said to me, “What’s amazing about Napster is not how fast it grew, but rather how slow it grew, given the fact that it removed all barriers to obtaining something that all people enjoy — music”. Why did it…
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Description Using Antithesis
In some of my reading, I have come upon a style of describing situations that I find fairly interesting.The authors use the antithesis or an anti-description as creating something that is very vivid. For example, from a recent reading: “The words seemed to drip from her mouth, not like water, but like mayonnaise” Or another one:…
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Diversification Mediocrity
I just read an insightful blog entry over at GigaOM on the Impact of Diversification on humans – namely that it leads to mediocrity. In a world, where people are increasingly focus limited, we end up either honing our focus on a specific investment or work, or we simply toss seeds wide because they can’t…