Finding Clarity in an Ambiguous World
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“enough money”
I was reading Slashdot this morning and came across this article I find the reasoning that “Apple already has enough money so they should stop trying to make it” pretty funny, on two different accounts. First, because we all think this way, “Someone has enough money now so they should stop trying to make it”…
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Free Prize Inside
I just finished reading, Free Prize Inside by Seth Godin. Another very worthwhile read by Seth. The primary ideas build on the foundation of creating products that are remarkable and thus able to inspire conversations between the consumers. One idea that he suggests is that of doing “Edgecrafting” instead of brainstorming. The idea is to…
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Tijuana & Marketing
My wife and I recently visited Tijuana. The central downtown amounts to a ton of people hanging around stores that are nearly identical with a huge mishmash of trinkets. They way they address the marketing question is large signs, and people standing out front trying to get your attention with boring phrases “Come in and…
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Stochastic Resonance & Human Perception
One of the things mentioned in The Perfect Mess was “Stochastic Resonance“. The essense of this is the idea that additional random noise can actually help us in deciphering messages than without it. You can read the wikipedia entry for a more indepth response. This idea is interesting when coupled with the idea that humans…
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A Perfect Mess – Part 2
I finished reading A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. I was hoping that this book would provide a mechanism for thinking through and assessing the cost of ‘neatness’ vs. the benefits of order. Instead, this turned out to be more of a book discussing mess and…
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How To Create Great Boards
[This was an essay on the blog, now turned into a post] The board is responsible for making sure that it fairly represents the shareholders interests in seeing the company move forward. Most of the articles talk about their being good governance techniques such as attendance, reviewing the material before the meeting, etc., that are…
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Dominating the Message
With my wife studying Spanish, I decided to look into some Spanish software so I could learn some too. Rosetta Stone was the first one I started with and then started reading some reviews. From there it lead me to another spanish program called “Learning Spanish Like Crazy” which was recommended. Then I did a…
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Threshhold of Relevance & Group Action
It’s interesting that people essentially don’t take notice of certain things until someone else mentions it to them. This ties into the example that shows up in both Blink and Influence about the woman who was stabbed three different times over some time with over 30 witnesses not one of whom called the police until…
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Blockbuster Security
Recently, when checking out a movie, I saw a very interesting security check. Blockbuster almost always asks for your current address to make sure you are still living at the same place. A woman was checking out a movie and she was doing so on her husbands card. The cashier said, “John?” and she said,…
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The Perfect Mess – Part 1
Taxes suck. Besides being horribly complicated, they highlight my inclination toward disorder rather than order. While I covet organizational systems, I don’t find that I use many of them or use them for long. This isn’t to say that I don’t generally know where to go find stuff, but I’m definitely more of a piler…
Got any book recommendations?