From an excellent 2004 essay called "How to Make Wealth:"
Someone graduating from college thinks, and is told, that he needs to get a job, as if the important thing were becoming a member of an institution. A more direct way to put it would be: you need to start doing something people want. You don't need to join a company to do that. All a company is is a group of people working together to do something people want. It's doing something people want that matters, not joining the group.
Also from The Cognitive style of PowerPoint, in the (legendary) section about the Columbia Accident:
Shakiness in conventions for units of measurements should provoke concern.*
[Footnote] *In their final report (p. 191), the Columbia Accident Investigation Board developed this point about units of measurement: "While such inconsistencies might seem minor, in highly technical fields like aerospace engineering a misplaced decimal point or mistaken unit of measurement can easily engender inconsistencies and inaccuracies."
Edward Tufte, writing in The Cognitive style of PowerPoint:
[Powerpoint] convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience. These costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spacial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up the narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spacial analysis, conspicuous decoration and Phluff, a preoccupation with format not content, an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.
Tufte goes a bit over the top here (I'm not sure that the word "Phluff" needs to exist) but in general I tend to agree with his argument here. From later in the piece:
Many true statements are too long to fit on a PP slide, but this does not mean we should abbreviate the truth to make the words fit. It means we should find a better way to make presentations.
Last week, I spoke with Brian Barela for a Future of Work project he's working on with Bill Jensen. It's partly a recap of my career and partly my view of the challenges that legacy companies are facing today.
There are, I'll have you know, remarkably few videos of me talking on the internet. Enjoy these while they're hot.
From an opinion piece in the Times about values and subjective well being (emphasis mine):
But here’s where the evolutionary cables have crossed: We assume that things we are attracted to will relieve our suffering and raise our happiness. My brain says, “Get famous.” It also says, “Unhappiness is lousy.” I conflate the two, getting, “Get famous and you’ll be less unhappy.”
But that is Mother Nature’s cruel hoax. She doesn’t really care either way whether you are unhappy — she just wants you to want to pass on your genetic material. If you conflate intergenerational survival with well-being, that’s your problem, not nature’s. And matters are hardly helped by nature’s useful idiots in society, who propagate a popular piece of life-ruining advice: “If it feels good, do it.” Unless you share the same existential goals as protozoa, this is often flat-out wrong.
From a long article about the differences in confidence between men and women:
The fact is, overconfidence can get you far in life. Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California at Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2009, he conducted some novel tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events, and asked them to tick off the ones they knew.Among the names were some well-disguised fakes: a Queen Shaddock made an appearance, as did a Galileo Lovano, and an event dubbed Murphy’s Last Ride. The experiment was a way of measuring excessive confidence, Anderson reasoned. The fact that some students checked the fakes instead of simply leaving them blank suggested that they believed they knew more than they actually did. At the end of the semester, Anderson asked the students to rate one another in a survey designed to assess each individual’s prominence within the group. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest status.
Penelope Boston, in a long interview about her time researching weird life forms (in our world and others):
It’s just amazing what one’s human experience does. This is why I think engineers should be forced to go out into nature and see if the systems they are designing can actually work. It’s one of the best ways for them to challenge their assumptions, and even to change the types of questions they might be asking in the first place.
From a long essay on the depth and power of the internet:
Some of the disconnect between what institutions could do online and what they do do online can be attributed to the clothesline paradox, a term environmental pioneer Steve Baer coined to describe the phenomenon in which activity that can be measured easily (e.g., running a clothes dryer) is valued over equally important activity that eludes measurement (e.g., drying clothes outside.) The same can be said for the way in which institutions habitually value activity such as visits to museums or journal articles published by their scholars over equally meaningful but more difficult to measure activity such as the sharing of museum-related materials on social media sites or the creation of wikipedia pages.
I'd apply this to the high value so many people attribute to reading (or writing) a book, relative to the low value attributed to shorter and more fleeting - but no less powerful or important - forms of communication.
Via Horace Dediu; emphasis mine:
We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
That last part - participating only where you can make a significant contribution - is important to me. Selling stuff that isn't somehow different, unique, or specific to my outlook and worldview is not where I want to focus my efforts.
A few quotes from a good article on Arup. Emphasis throughout is mine.
Problem-solving in the Arup fashion, it turns out, means not being afraid to cause a few problems along the way. “It’s that ability to believe that chaos in a way resolves itself—it doesn’t matter if it’s overly complicated to begin with,” Carfrae says. “Just keep talking, and at some point, it’ll become clear.”
And:
A unique corporate ethos, one so totalizing as to amount almost to a sort of civic cult, pervades the firm, and it gives the engineers the impetus to go out on a limb the way they do: Organizationally, the firm is configured on the horizontal axis rather than the vertical, with a rotating set of board members and trustees who guide the direction of the company but are never far removed from its operations or shut off from the voices of workaday engineers. “Everybody in Arup feels totally empowered to have a view on everything,” says engineer Tristram Carfrae. As an Arup Fellow, Carfrae is part of that active, vocal culture, functioning as a free agent who can move from office to office and project to project, helping to counter the centralizing, sclerotic tendency that sometimes besets large companies like Arup. Most importantly, Arup is wholly owned by its employees, with profits shared equitably by all of its offices. If, say, the firm overall has a banner year but one of its affiliates stumbles, the chairman and employees of the latter won’t suffer for it financially. As a result, every engineer has the freedom to try something new without constantly fretting over the bottom line.
And:
In any case, after nearly seven decades and tens of thousands of structures big and small, Arup seems confident in its own singularity. “Every time we take advice from a management consultant, we take it as what not to do,” jokes Carfrae, adding, “We don’t want to become like the corporate mainstream.” To Raman, what makes the company unique isn’t a matter of looking back to a set of antiquated commandments, but of finding practical ways to apply them to today’s problems. Arup’s heritage isn’t “a mantra that’s out there,” says the chairman. “Don’t refer to it. Bloody live the thing.” The proof, after all, is in the projects, and whatever indirections Arup’s process might entail, its engineers seem to be finding their way just fine.
Ove Arup, founder of the supercool engineering/design company:
Specialisation is an evil because it makes a person narrow-minded and makes communication with others difficult ... imagination and invention — essential for a creative engineer — flourish on cross-fertilisation from other fields of knowledge.
From an old HBR article on generalists:
Professor Phillip Tetlock conducted a 20+ year study of 284 professional forecasters. He asked them to predict the probability of various occurrences both within and outside of their areas of expertise. Analysis of the 80,000+ forecasts found that experts are less accurate predictors than non-experts in their area of expertise. Tetlock’s conclusion: when seeking accuracy of predictions, it is better to turn to those like “Berlin’s prototypical fox, those who know many little things, draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradictions.” Ideological reliance on a single perspective appears detrimental to one’s ability to successfully navigate vague or poorly-defined situations (which are more prevalent today than ever before).
This is shocking, troubling, and so obvious. Emphasis mine; I recommend reading the whole article on HBR.
Psychologists Kimberlee Weaver, Stephen Garcia, and Norbert Schwarz recently illustrated the Presenter’s Paradox in an elegant series of studies. For example, they showed that when buyers were presented with an iPod Touch package that contained either an iPod, cover, and one free song download, or just an iPod and cover, they were willing to pay an average of $177 for the package with the download, and $242 for the one without the download. So the addition of the low-value free song download brought down the perceived value of the package by a whopping $65! Perhaps most troubling, when a second set of participants were asked to play the role of marketer and choose which of the two packages they thought would be more attractive to buyers, 92% of them chose the package with the free download...
The same pattern emergences when you are creating deterrents or negative consequences to discourage bad behavior. In another study, participants were asked to choose between two punishments to give for littering: a $750 fine plus two hours of community service, or a $750 fine. 86% of participants felt that the fine plus community service would be the stronger deterrent. But they were wrong — in fact, a separate set of participants rated the $750 with the two hours of community service as significantly less severe than the fine alone. Once again, they reasoned that the overall punishment was on average less awful because two hours of community service isn’t so bad.
Ben Bajarin on twitter:
I hear x sport is boring too often by smart people. If strategy interests you, you should be able to appreciate every sport.
Fucking yes.
From an old Paul Graham essay about essays:
In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
To represent the world as systems of interdependent logics we need not elevate those logics to the level of myth, nor focus on the logics of our myths. Instead, we would have to meditate on the logics in everything, to see the world as one built of weird, rusty machines whose gears squeal as they grind against one another, rather than as stories into which we might write ourselves as possible characters.
From a very crazy, very good article about Star Trek, language, and meaning.
Paul Graham, in an old essay:
Obscurity is like health food—unpleasant, perhaps, but good for you. Whereas fame tends to be like the alcohol produced by fermentation. When it reaches a certain concentration, it kills off the yeast that produced it.
From a talk called The Value of Science. Emphasis mine.
But I would like not to underestimate the value of the world view which is the results of scientific effort. We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck - half of us upside down - by a mysterious attraction to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea.
From an old essay:
A lot of startups worry "what if Google builds something like us?" Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about-- not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails.
I think that being smart barely enters the equation. Motivation, though, counts.
Alfie Kohn, as quoted by Jacob Kaplan-Moss in a very good piece about "unlimited" vacation policies:
To describe much of what is wrong with our workplaces is to enumerate the effects of restricting people’s sense of self-determination...people are most motivated when they are able to participate in making decisions about organizational goals.
Agreed.