Category: Leadership
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Blame Avoidance vs Name Making
With the economic uncertainty that we are living through, there is a marked shift in thinking that effects almost everyone. When things are good, there is a desire to be great, to stand out, to make a name for yourself. You want attention because attention is sparse. Success is celebrated and missteps are quickly forgiven.…
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For Fear of Getting Burned
Everything is in a constant state of flux, except our first impressions. Over the last few years, I can’t tell you how often I have been warned away from some solution or another because someone was burned by it in the past (often times in the distant past). It’s not that past experience should be…
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Tea Bog Beet Knee [The Curse Of Knowledge]
In the process of learning Spanish, I’ve had a lot of thoughts regarding the nature of communication. When we are communicating, we know what we are trying to say and so whatever we say sounds completely unambiguous. The “Made To Stick” authors talk about this concept as “The Curse Of Knowledge” and it’s extremely present…
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The Mental Pain Of Change
Several weeks ago, my wife and I decided to go out for dinner and a movie. On our way, we drove by a soccer game between the state team and my wife’s school. A decision point came up: should we stop, change our plans and watch a soccer game instead of our previous plans? These…
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Affection Grows with Familiarity
Ever tried designing a website, logo, or essay and found that the longer you worked on it the more you liked the result? Ever heard a song once and thought, wow that was good, but the tenth time was even better? Why does watching the 5th episode of a television show give us more enjoyment…
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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…