Hemingway’s girlfriend, the writer Martha Gellhorn, didn’t think the artist needed to be a monster; she thought the monster needed to make himself into an artist. “A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (Well, I guess she would know.) She’s saying if you’re a really awful person, you are driven to greatness in order to compensate the world for all the awful shit you […]
Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. Ed Catmull
We were not nimble in any way, shape, or form. Sean Percival.
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.
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.
I’ve survived a lot of things, and I’ll probably survive this. J.D. Salinger
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 […]
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.
Quidquid latine dictum, altum videtur. Whatever’s said in Latin seems profound.
Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. Conway’s Law.
What’s changed is that competitive advantage is no longer the sum of all efficiencies, but the sum of all connections. Strategy, therefore, must be focused on deepening and widening networks of information, talent, partners, and consumers. Brands, in effect, have become more than assets to be leveraged, but platforms for collaboration. Greg Satell
So, we as individuals and as leaders should actively promote dissent in group decision making, not for the sake of dissent itself, but for its ability to spark divergent thinking and to guide people past the sharing and preference biases lurking in the dark shadows of our minds. Constructive uncertainty is a required skill for the 21st century.
Uncertainty is an uncomfortable position. But certainty is an absurd one. Voltaire
The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones. John Maynard Keynes
I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally billions of dollars of failures. You might remember Pets.com or Kosmo.com. It was like getting a root canal with no anesthesia. None of those things are fun. But they also don’t matter. What really matters is, companies that don’t continue to experiment, companies that don’t embrace failure, they eventually get in a desperate position where the only thing they can do is a Hail Mary […]
