A dozen books exploring people and their stories, facets of cognition, and our humanity. I'm rereading Quiet: the Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain We tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes … | Continue reading
Dan Pink has spent the past two decades trying to understand how people work, how organizations function and in particular how we can use social science —psychology, economics, linguistics, etc.— to do things a little better. In his 2016 Commencement Address at Georgetown, Pink s … | Continue reading
We create our own reality through our decisions. “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves,” says Viktor Frankl. We are responsible for how we respond to problems and for the meaning we derive from things. And we are not alone, we're … | Continue reading
Our relationship with time is complicated in more than one way. We live by the clock. Yet, I'd wager that most of us would love not to have it that way. Witness our holidays, which likely involve looking at a watch, or a phone, as little as possible. There is a reason why we feel … | Continue reading
It happens in every company, eventually the internal dynamics become more important than what happens with the customer, what she wants to talk about, what he's thinking about. In fact, we often (still) prefer the detached rooms of research to a human contact. We over-engineer fe … | Continue reading
“When you risk little, you can’t be disappointed if you don’t excel. You are not failing to thrive; you just aren’t trying.” [Ambassador Samantha Power] To live fully and leave the world in a better place that we found it, we have to get close to the action. This is the message A … | Continue reading
With our pace anywhere from quick to ludicrous, as Mel Brooks would say, we tend to skim the surface of most things and situations. For many, this is a survival mechanism, until it becomes a habit and keeps us from the actual physical experience of living. Sir Ken Robinson would … | Continue reading
“Living is a process of regrounding ourselves. How can we reground ourselves and in what, where, whom?” [Constance Goodwin] When I came across David Bowie's philosophical interview, it put context and dimension around his list of must-read books. Conversations have the power to d … | Continue reading
In science we need to track the misses along with the hits. The same is true for business —we want to prove and disprove reality. We call people who do that skeptics. Psychologist and science historian Michael Shermer is director of the Skeptics Society. He publishes Skeptic maga … | Continue reading
In the interview below for French television to introduce his album Heathen in 2002, David Bowie talks about art, religion and philosophy. He starts by saying that all his albums are negative, yet the content of all his albums provides continuity —the themes of alienation and iso … | Continue reading
“For fragmentation is now very widespread, not only throughout society, but also in each individual, and this is leading to a kind of general confusion of the mind, which creates an endless series of problems and interferes with our clarity of perception so seriously as to preven … | Continue reading
My marketing colleague Stephen Denny, together with Dr. Paul Leinberger at Denny Leinberger Strategy, just published a global survey to help us understand the impact of technology on culture, from the mindset generated by device dependence, to “social dislocation” to the plummeti … | Continue reading
We fall in love with ideas and stories we have of ourselves, our work, and the people in our lives, and we hold on to them tightly. Forgetting that change happens. Our attempt to “balance” work with relationships and self create an unnecessary burden —we are asking the wrong ques … | Continue reading
Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási wrote about the new science of networks prior to the founding of Facebook. His account of how everything is connected to everything else is remarkably accurate 13 years later, when the science of networks has taken on a greater role in e … | Continue reading
What makes an individual who they are? How do they develop their personality? Cambridge research professor Brian Little focuses on moments when we transcend the traits psychologists study. We do it because our culture demands it, or because we demand it. Trait psychology looks at … | Continue reading
“A lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance,” says Pamela Meyer. “Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie.” We are not always willing participants. Master forger and con man Henry Oberlander who was active in the 1930s understood human psychology we … | Continue reading
Our minds are filled with ideas. Most of our ideas are linked together —they form our personal worldview, our brain's operating system (OS). It is the network of our ideas that helps us navigate the world. Talks have secret lives —they can travel from our own neural networks to t … | Continue reading
“Because we think we know, we stop looking.” [Alan Judd] There is still plenty of opportunity in the gaps between what we say and what we do, between what we want and what we actually need, and in good experiences. In The Ten Faces of Innovation IDEO's Tom Kelley and Jonathan Lit … | Continue reading
When we search for an item, the list of entries our browser brings back to us is more or less a self-fulfilling prophecy —the list of items most linked to, searched by and clicked on as a result of our own search behavior and the average of the people around us. The business mode … | Continue reading
“The best scientists and engineers are just as creative as the best storytellers.” [Steve Jobs] If we were to say Pixar in 1996, not too many in the business world would have paid attention. But Steve Jobs did. He understood this was no technology company, that they were in the b … | Continue reading
Why do some people succeed, having remarkable and productive productive lives, while so many more never reach their potential? Culture, especially American culture, would have us believe success is the product of individual effort. We would like to believe hard work pays off. But … | Continue reading
“I criticize by creation, not finding fault.” [Cicero] There is a reason why we get some of our best ideas when we're in a dreamy state. Ideas bubble up from our consciousness as we are about to let go of the awake state with its often frenetic activities and busyness. He says: I … | Continue reading
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.” [Marie Curie] She was a physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity —her research papers are still radioactive more than 100 … | Continue reading
“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses—especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” [Leonardo da Vinci] In the early 1480s, Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinc … | Continue reading
“From 1733 to 1758, Ben Franklin dispensed useful and timeless advice through Poor Richard's Almanack. Among the virtues extolled were thrift, duty, hard work, and simplicity. Subsequently, two centuries went by during which Ben's thoughts on these subjects were regarded as the l … | Continue reading
“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.” It's more than fifty years old and still holds. Catch-22 is the story of Yossarian, a hero endlessly inventive in his schemes to save his skin from the horrible chances of war in Italy during World War II. Yossari … | Continue reading
Umberto Eco (1932-2016) believed in the value of subjecting what we read to inquiry. “History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power —bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distri … | Continue reading
In a 2014 report the Boston Consulting Group says that nearly $1 trillion of the $1.8 trillion spent on “luxuries” in 2013 was spent on experiences — 55 percent. “When we buy experiences, those purchases make us happier than when we buy things,” says Joseph Pine, the co-author of … | Continue reading
Naval Adm. William H. McRaven, ninth commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, is also an alumni of the University of Texas at Austin where he delivered a Commencement address on May 17, 2014. “What starts here changes the world” is the University slogan. McRaven starts with … | Continue reading
It was 1964. RAND researcher Paul Baran began thinking about the optimal structure of the Internet. He envisioned a network of unmanned nodes that would act as switches, routing information from one node to another to their final destinations. Baran suggested there were three pos … | Continue reading
“Mankind has always sought to substitute energy for reason, as if running faster will give one a better sense of direction.” [Bernard Baruch] Baruch was an American financier, stock investor, philanthropist, statesman, and political consultant. While the quotation above is about … | Continue reading
To bridge the gap between perception and skill we need to build on technique, says the emperor Hadrian in Memoirs of Hadrian via Marguerite Yourcenar. Describing the emperor's early years: “I was beginning to have my legend, that strange flashing reflection made up partly of what … | Continue reading
In Creativity, Inc: Ed Catmull talks about the role of culture in the making of a company that works (emphasis mine): Improvement didn’t happen overnight. But by the time we finished A Bug’s Life, the production managers were no longer seen as impediments to creative progress but … | Continue reading
From many of his interviews, including his Reddit AMA, it's clear that Elon Musk loves to learn. Something we have in common in addition to growing up elsewhere and being determined to work in the U.S. as a goal from a young age. He studied the mechanics of engineering and design … | Continue reading
Many of the stories we read as children open new worlds to us. By cultivating this interior space we call imagination, we learn to weave together ideas we get with situations we face in the world. What is real? It depends on who we ask more than we'd like to admit. Mac Barnett is … | Continue reading
“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible.” [Lord Kelvin, President Royal Society, 1885] On a winter day in 1903, in a remote spot called Kitty Hawk the Wright Brothers were the first to fly a motor-powered airplane. It had taken them four years to get there. They also und … | Continue reading
In Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics Gary Zukav says: “The importance of nonsense can hardly be overstated. The more clearly we experience something as 'nonsense', the more clearly we are experiencing the boundaries of our own self-imposed cognitive structures … | Continue reading
“When people talk, listen completely. Most people never listen.” [Ernest Hemingway] Listening has become a rare skill. In a visual and written world we are losing our ability to pay close attention to what we hear so we can respond to what is happening in new ways. We react to si … | Continue reading
Neal Stephenson is an author of speculative fiction who weaves minutely detailed historical and technical information into his complex stories, usually combining it with a wicked sense of humor. His ground-breaking novels include Snow Crash, which weaves virtual reality with Sume … | Continue reading
What is real and what is the product of our mental storytelling? We discover the gap between our perception of work, life, and events and the real story (or a more real one) when we engage curiosity. Why is that so? How can we find out? Beyond the obvious, which is we see the wor … | Continue reading
In a paper on Warmth and Competence as Universal Dimensions of Social Perception published with Susan Fiske and Peter Glick, Amy Cuddy presents a framework that synthesizes how individuals and groups perceive a combination of these traits to determine status as they decide whethe … | Continue reading
“Our job in this life is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” [Steven Pressfield] Regardless of whether we consider ourselves artists, maybe others see us that way because we are able to add that spec … | Continue reading
We are constantly pressed to do more with less, or to become better at producing more of the things that get us greater results. We want to spend more of our time doing things that work and less on failing. To do that, we need to become more of what we are. Because of our biases … | Continue reading
Einstein predicted Gravitational Waves 100 years ago, and their existence has now been confirmed. “If scientists are still doing his homework from a 100 years ago,” says Stephen Colbert. He must have been pretty smart. Astrophysicist Brian Greene explains that gravitational waves … | Continue reading
From Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar. “Like everyone else, I have had at my disposal only three means of evaluating human existence: the study of self, which is the most difficult and most dangerous method, but also the most fruitful; the observation of our fellowmen, … | Continue reading
In an attempt to manage risk tightly, most organizations still have an industrial approach to hiring. This involves the formulation of increasingly more detailed task-oriented long descriptions of to do things for individual positions, which are then entered into systems still co … | Continue reading
Temple Grandin is an expert on animal behavior. She has designed humane handling systems for half the cattle-processing facilities in the US. The culmination of almost thirty years of research, experimentation, and experience her Animals Make Us Human teaches us to challenge our … | Continue reading
For every hard question we encounter there seems to be a simple answer, common sense. We are seduced by the idea that what looks obvious must be so. Yet common sense fails us. Being that right and wrong are not absolutes, to put it with Asimov, what seems so right is often more o … | Continue reading