16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Tags
Decision Making, Heuristics, Human Systems, Humans, Implicit Knowledge, Life, problem solving, Science vs Art, Social Context, strategy
Life is not a sanitized laboratory experiment. It’s rather a messy ebb and flow that makes scientific precision a futile pursuit. The scientific method has its rightful place in the universe, but human affairs are more artful than scientific.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, management, Organizational Development
Tags
Alignment, Consensus, convergence, democracy, Diversity, Experience, Leadership, mental models, Organizations, Thatcher, Totalitarian Regimes, Trust
I don’t believe in descriptive instantiations of leadership – and even less so in prescriptive recipes. Paraphrasing Thatcher’s “being a leader is like being a lady”, describing what leadership is or how it can be enacted defeats the very purpose.
16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in philosophy, society
Tags
Buckminster Fuller, creativity, Enlightenment, Fractals, Life, Meaning, Patterns, Purpose, Society, Subtlety, Universe, wisdom
In my previous blog contrasting creativity and planning I described the creative act as the probabilistic intersection of thought “patterns in the making” and the circumstantial experiences which completes their meaning. A life spent surfacing new patterns is an elevating journey that frees one from the grayer reality of zero sum games unfortunately still prolific in our supposedly civilized society. It is also a fulfilling endeavor that brings man closer to his rightful place in the cosmos as an implicated observer, as a “function of the universe itself” in Buckminster Fuller’s words.
13 Saturday Jul 2013
Posted in human capital, innovation, knowledge, problem solving, strategy
One of my favorite study subjects is of course myself. And when it comes to good ideas, I’ve come to notice over the years that the essence of a truly inspired idea forms in only a few seconds. This almost instantaneous process is usually triggered by exposure to a unique experience that provides the missing piece that completes a thought pattern in the making. Patterns in the making or simply incomplete patterns, are themselves the result of internalizing prior knowledge and experiences, which, for a creative individual, should be a continuous process. And so, the creative potential emerges at the intersection between patterns in the making and exposure to diverse experiences.
11 Thursday Jul 2013
Posted in business, Emerging Markets, innovation, problem solving, society
I’ve written before about the huge pool of abductive reasoning in emerging economies and the opportunity it represents for western multinationals. This piece will explore the negative implications of that same mental resource for emerging economies themselves.
10 Wednesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, human capital, innovation
Tags
HR, human capital, Innovation, Mavericks, Reliability bias, Risk
About a month ago I argued in one of my blog entries that current HR practices’ bias towards reliability is killing innovation. This is a short update to provide further supporting evidence.
03 Wednesday Jul 2013
Tags
business, Empower, Hints, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Talent, value, wisdom
“Managing” true talent is a misnomer. Subjecting the truly inspired to rules is akin to plowing fields with Ferraries – yes it might just work, but it sure is stupid. Use the talented rather for creating the recipes around which the hoards of less inspired can be assembled and scaled. In the same vein, don’t compensate the truly talented by the hour or with a fixed income: you would in effect incentivize them to limit their imagination. Strategy and vision are holistic products, they cannot be bought or measured by the hour, and don’t bow to quantitative rewards.
So then how can you empower the talented? Here’s a few hints.
03 Wednesday Jul 2013
Tags
21st century, complexity, cost-reduction, DARPA, development cycles, Government, Lean, Resilience
I see two key challenges for 21st century governments: lean operations and resilient design. While based on fundamentally distinct mindsets, mastering the two practices would drive similar benefits, primarily cost-reduction.
26 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in future, innovation, society
Tags
economics, foundations, future, human evolution, Invention, knowledge work, labor, metaphysics, Physics, politics, predicament, Technology
I’ve often wondered whether economics can be called a fundamental “science.” Much like physics can describe the rules of the game we call “reality” without a definitive answer as to how the game was set in motion in the primordial universe, so does economics seem to me to focus primarily on transactional mechanisms for value without a profound appreciation for how value materializes out of grey matter. Money is, or should be, an accurate measure of value, but ever since we moved away from bartering we have forever decoupled our transactional mechanisms (either in time or measure) from fundamental value, allowing us additional transactional flexibility in time and space, but also resulting in economic cycles, nothing more than periodic corrections to the coupling mechanisms.
26 Wednesday Jun 2013
Posted in business
Tags
business, Communication, Decision Making, dos and don'ts, Entrepreneurship, lessons learnt, wisdom, work delegation
So you’re a new entrepreneur. Here’s some snippets of wisdom from my entrepreneurial experience in the form of DOs and DON’Ts that might help:
The art and science of the possible 