No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect […]
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. Ed Catmull
Catmull describes a turning point that occurred during the making Toy Story 2. People at Pixar worked long hours, seven days a week over a grueling nine-month period to complete the movie. By the end of the nine months, one-third of the staff had repetitive stress injuries. On one occasion, an exhausted artist forgot to drop his infant son off at day care and left him in his car parked in the broiling Pixar parking […]
By accepting this narrative of progress uncritically, imagining that technological change equals historic human betterment, many in Silicon Valley excuse themselves from moral reflection. Put simply, the progress narrative short-circuits moral reflection on the consequences of new technologies. Source.
This week, Tony Hsieh issued a challenge to every Zappos employee: self organize or leave. I wrote a post on the challenges of going Holacratic. Update: I was asked to come to Zappos to deliver this in-person. Tony Hsieh wasn’t jazzed about my opinion. Only time will tell. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The authors find that the relationship between the growth in the size of companies and the level of inequality holds across the rich world. They looked at data from 1981 to 2010 on wages and the size of largest firms for 15 countries in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. The relationship between rising levels of income inequality and the size of firms was strong. This effect is particularly noticeable in America and […]
We were not nimble in any way, shape, or form. Sean Percival.
The other major change was that the job of a teller changed. Banks began to offer more services, and tellers evolved from being people who put checks in one drawer and handed out cash from another drawer to people who solved a variety of financial problems for customers. Source. When people get scared about robots replacing workers, the ATM is the usual salve. We hope that technology makes it so humans can offer deeper […]
Yes, everybody understood because we all live in this weird thing together called Hollywood. If we all actually were nice, it wouldn’t work. Disgraced studio exec, Amy Pascal. What’s the point of working your way to a position of power if you just prop up the same shitty power structure you are supposedly unhappy with?
US neuroscientists published details of experiments on rats, showing that in certain unpredictable situations, they stop trying to make decisions based on past experience. Instead, a circuit in their brains switches to “random mode”. The researchers’ hunch is that this serves a purpose: past experience is usually helpful, but when uncertainty levels are high, it can mislead, so randomness is in the rats’ best interests. Source. You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know […]
The greatest illusion is the illusion of control. Source.
You can easily fit all the planets in the Solar System back to back into the distance from the Earth to the Moon. MIND. BLOWN.
A complex system has no repeating relationships between cause and effect, is highly sensitive to small interventions and cannot be determined by outcome based targets, hence the need for experimentation; hence when dealing with complex systems there is the need for experimentation. From Dave Snowden.
SimCity players have discussed a variety of creative strategies for their virtual homelessness problem. They’ve suggested waiting for natural disasters like tornadoes to blow the vagrants away, bulldozing parks where they congregate, or creating such a woefully insufficient city infrastructure that the homeless would leave on their own. Source. Two things the real world lacks that games and simulations don’t: The ability to make dramatic changes to the fabric of reality Obsessive players more interested in the […]
Bezos’s guiding principle for Amazon has always been to start with the needs and desires of the customer and work backward. But when it came to the Fire Phone, that customer apparently became Jeff Bezos. He envisioned a list of whiz-bang features, and the Tyto team started experimenting with a slew of promising technologies: near-field communication for contactless payments, hands-free interactions to allow users to navigate the interface through mid-air gestures, and a force-sensitive grip […]
There’s a third reason why complexity economics is under-rated. It does not give us a means of foreseeing the future. Of course, conventional economics doesn’t do so either. But the difference is that complexity theory tells us that such forecasts might well be impossible – which is not what the customer wants to hear. The best it can do is help us understand what has happened. And for me, this is good enough. As someone once said, […]
One of the hardest lessons to internalize in software engineering is the hidden costs of additional complexity. Sometimes, complexity is just inherent in the problem space. Matching passengers and drivers while adjusting prices to balance supply and demand is a complex and hard problem. So is routing questions and answers to the people most likely to answer and read them while scaling a community and maintaining quality. Or developing a rich document editor that works […]
A report by Barclays shows that in the five years to March 2011, hedge funds run by women and minorities returned 82.4 per cent, while non-diverse funds returned only 51 per cent. They did this with much less volatility, and with a far smaller drawdown during the 2008 crisis. Yet only 3.3 per cent of all hedge funds were run by women or minorities. Source.
