The results were definitive: Friends outperformed acquaintances on both tasks. The reason? Friends were more committed at the start of a project, showed better communication while doing the activity, and offered teammates positive encouragement every step of the way. They also evaluated ideas more critically and gave one another feedback when they were off course. The impact of having a friend at work. I’ve been asking that question as part of a survey in most of my […]
Why has Strive made progress when so many other efforts have failed? It is because a core group of community leaders decided to abandon their individual agendas in favor of a collective approach to improving student achievement. More than 300 leaders of local organizations agreed to participate, including the heads of influential private and corporate foundations, city government officials, school district representatives, the presidents of eight universities and community colleges, and the executive directors of […]
It turns out that when we are confronted with a situation that presents no obvious pattern our brains amp up the dopamine levels, making us superstitious. The situation creates cognitive confusion and we respond accordingly. Source.
Rent the Runway today operates the largest dry cleaner in the country in a 160,000 square foot facility and has built software that manages the inventory, delivery, and fulfillment of 65,000 dresses and tens of thousands of accessories across its millions of members. Source.
We call this emerging class of systems human-agent collectives (HACs) to reflect the close partnership and the flexible social interactions between the humans and the computers. As well as exhibiting increased autonomy, such systems are inherently open and social. This openness means participants need to continually and flexibly establish and manage a range of social relationships. Thus, depending on the task at hand, different constellations of people, resources, and information must come together, operate in a coordinated […]
I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this. J.D. Salinger
If you find yourself in need of an ounce of liquor, just ask your barkeep for a pony. Plan on driving home for Christmas break? Say 230 miles? That’ll increase your risk of dying by one micromort. And that enormous 7-layer dip your auntie makes, how many Royal Albert Hall’s is that? How long will a user wait for a webpage to load? Generally, a nanocentury. How’s that parcel of land you just bought? Did the realtor give you […]
But by the turn of the millennium cool had ceased to be credible as a political stance, and we have since seen yet another shift, from conspicuous non-conformity to what we can call “conspicuous authenticity.” The trick now is to subtly demonstrate that while you may have a job, a family, and a house full of stuff, you are not spiritually connected to any of it. What matters now is not just buying things, it […]
You deserve to work with folks with little tolerance for politics and posturing because it undermines the culture that can drive success. You deserve leaders that welcome mistakes but hate needless surprises. Jesse Hertzberg.
Pixar Founder, Ed Catmull, shares his secret to improving creative works and fueling the most prolific hit-maker of our times: The Braintrust. You may be thinking, How is the Braintrust different from any other feedback mechanism? There are two key differences, as I see it. The first is that the Braintrust is made up of people with a deep understanding of storytelling, who usually have been through the process themselves. While the directors welcome critiques from many […]
I hypothesize that the management overhead which makes corporations grow sub-linearly is due to the limited information processing capability of individual humans. People at the top do not have local on-the-ground information: how are individual products performing, what are customers’ complaints etc. And the rank-and-file folks on the ground do not have the relevant high-level information: how does what I’m doing translate to the value that the corporation as a whole seeks to maximize? In […]
Finally, at the end of the meeting, Donahoe came to a decision: “Alright,” he said, addressing Abraham and Palmer, “you guys have carte blanche to do this. Any resources you need, any money, any human capital, you’ve got it. The only thing that I ask is that you don’t tell anyone about what you’re doing.” […] Within moments, the two of them were at a laptop, scouring eBay’s internal site for offices around the world […]
First of all, everything we do is in service of a single goal: transparency. We’ve discovered over time that most of our difficulties arise when a project becomes murky or goes dark. Design is a holistic practice and we can only truly design for the entire product when we can see across it with ease. In addition to making our own work easier, transparency also gives designers a chance to cross-collaborate on projects that they’re […]
Most entrepreneurs still think that just because their technology is superior it will inevitably be widely adopted in the marketplace. But consumers don’t work like that. Next time you come across an engineer aiming to commercialize a superior new technology, ask if his industry meets the criteria described above. If not, he’d do much better to focus on low-end disruption by encapsulating the technology in a product that is in some way simpler, more convenient […]
Three former executives said the old regime seized on the bad numbers to cast Hanson’s tech-focused ambitions in a dubious light. They said Markfield, in particular, felt that Hanson cared too much about developing AE’s web and mobile operations, and feared that expanding in outlets and internationally, while lucrative, might dilute the core brand. Markfield was also no fan of Hanson’s emphasis on personalization — for example, curating merchandise in stores based on the type […]
Why is culture so important to a business? Here is a simple way to frame it. The stronger the culture, the less process a company needs. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next “(wo)man on the moon” leap. Ever […]
You don’t create a culture. Culture happens. It’s the by-product of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, and you give them the freedom to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust then trust will be built into your culture. Artificial cultures are instant. They’re big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly, and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real cultures are built […]
The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions. Dave E. Smalley.
Don’t let the process become the goal. As we try to think about our own process at Percolate I want to make sure we don’t end up down this road. As a company grows it’s natural for people to desire more documentation, clarification, and general process, and all of those are good things. However, as you go down the road of designing process you always run the risk of losing sight of the real objectives, […]
As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over […]
