Month: October 2009
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The Pursuit of Flow
In the last few weeks, I’ve come across this idea in several different forms and thought it was worth capturing and sharing. Along the X axis, is your ability or skill level. Along the Y axis, is the degree of challenge or difficulty of the task you are trying to accomplish. When we don’t have…
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The Original Ambient Intimacy – Meeting Face To Face
Over the last week, I spent some time meeting with both our clients and colleagues in person. I’ve long thought that meeting in person is the only way to have a truly good working relationship with people . However, I have long had a hard time enumerating the benefits to people – something that budget…
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Poor Assumptions and Over Engineering
After arriving in Bogotá, we were flying back to Quito and I had a boarding pass with my seat number handwritten on the ticket. It appeared to say 8K and I thought, K?! — there is no such seat on a plane with only 6 seats across. But as an engineer, I have the ability…
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Confirmation Bias Fail
This summer, my wife and I traveled to Columbia. On our way from Medellin to Bogota, we showed up at the Medellin airport with plenty of time. The airport was closed down (no flights it seemed) due to massive amounts of fog and I made several assumptions: The plane hasn’t arrived yet from Bogita yet…
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Fail Quickly
Yesterday, I talked about the importance of embracing failure. The second aspect of this is the speed of failure. There are many projects for which feedback is very slow and this can cause two problems. First, not being able to see the entire system and how decisions that were made earlier create a failure much…
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Embracing Failure
When my parents were living in Sweden, my mom was studying Swedish and finally got up enough courage to try out some of her new learnings on the bus with a fellow passenger. She made a comment to the passenger in Swedish and the elderly woman turned to her and said (in English, very slowly…
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What Motivates Us
Recently, I read this study regarding whether rewarding altruism causes it to disappear, and it reminded me of the two other examples that illustrate that our motives tend to be far more complicated then things first appear. For example, Freakonomics discusses a day care center which decided to start charging parents extra if they picked…
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Finding a Job in a Recession
Right now the job market is tough. Like most businesses trying to get attention (and subsequently money) from an increasingly attention and cash poor consumer, job seekers are trying to seek the attention (and subsequent employment) from an increasingly conservative group of businesses. Sometime ago, I came across this presentation: “Recession Proof Graduate” which I…
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Resonance and Distortion
Ever listen to a song that you really like, I mean, REALLY like. The kind of song you just automatically reach for the volume to turn it up when you hear it. It resonates with you and evokes powerful emotions. But what happens when you turn it up past the point your speakers can handle:…
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What Do You Dwell On?
On a recent business trip, our CEO connected with a friend and shared some of the challenges that he has recently gone through. The friend shared that when he was going through a very difficult time in his life, he read an article that “changed his life”. As he recounted the content of the article,…