You say you want a revolutionWell, you knowWe all want to change the world Many readers will recognize these lines as the opening to the Beatles’ 1968 song Revolution. More than just a catchy tune, the song is notable because it was the first time the Beatles expressed political views so publicly. We might all…
Simon “Si” Ramo is a remarkable person. Ramo is a world-renowned scientist and engineer. He was the chief architect of the US intercontinental ballistic missile system. He was the ‘R’ in TRW, the multibillion-dollar aerospace company now part of Northrop Grumman. And last year, at the age of 100, he became the oldest person to be…
We are stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works. This is a fantastic quote from Douglas Adams, best known as the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the answer to life, the universe and everything. This specific quote appears in another book, The Salmon of Doubt,…
Practically everyone has a machine-to-machine Internet of Things story they like to tell. It might be refrigerators automatically reordering milk, cows that send texts to farmers when they’re in heat, or understanding the demand for ice cream in real-time. We are living in a networked economy. The traditional understanding of networks is based on the…
Having been in the technology industry for the last 25 years, I’ve felt the need to be constantly learning just to stay current. When I was a developer, it was programming languages: FORTRAN, Pascal, C, Smalltalk, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby – I could never quite keep up. Over the last few years, I’ve experienced…
As a way of encouraging my team to take more risks, I’ve been espousing the philosophy “Failure is the new black” and have been cataloging quotes on failure from famous people. But increased risk-taking doesn’t just come from pithy quotes, it helps to provide examples of people who failed… and thrived. Here are four such stories:…
I recently decided to reduce my sugar intake but, disappointingly, I just ate the bowl of ice cream they offered me on my flight. I hadn’t planned to eat it but said yes without really thinking about it. Ice cream on a plane has become a habit. According to the research of Wendy Wood, a…
Ever notice that some people get more things done than others? For years, the most popular explanation came from Steve Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Covey argued that personal character, purpose and self-discipline were the primary characteristics of successful people. The book has been wildly successful, selling more than 20M copies. My only…
In a world filled with electronic devices, I still get great satisfaction by crossing out items on a handwritten to-do list. In fact, I find that I am more likely to complete a task if I write it down on a piece of paper. Much more likely than if it’s on an electronic list or…
When you ask someone to do something, be sure to include the statement that they are free to choose to do it or not. Adding this phrase doubles the likelihood they will do it. It’s an example of disruptive persuasion. Davis and Knowles demonstrated another simple persuasion method which they dubbed the disrupt-then-reframe technique. In…