Remember the saying that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? It’s a concept we inherently understand: if we pull on the chain, the weakest link will fail first which breaks the entire chain. Sometimes people invoke the metaphor to explain why we should concentrate on helping the lowest performers in a…
Every company needs a compelling origin story. An origin story reveals how a character became the protagonist (or antagonist), usually providing a compelling event which explains their intentions or behavior. Comics and movies use origin stories to explain how characters got their superpowers or why they are supervillains. Recently, entertainment companies have rewritten the origins…
These three laws, simple as they are, form much of the basis of probability theory. Properly applied, they can give us much insight into the workings of nature and the everyday world. – Leonard Mlodinow That quote is from Leonard Mlodinow’s book, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. The book contains examples as…
Leonardo da Vinci might have been one of the earliest adopters of exponential thinking. da Vinci was born more than 500 years ago in semi-rural Tuscany to parents of modest means. Despite little access to formal education, he was able to extrapolate forward-thinking ideas about subjects as diverse as architecture, engineering, mathematics, urban planning, science…
When I ask people to name the most revolutionary technology, the most common answers are the Internet and the mobile phone. Both have certainly fundamentally changed our lives and it is difficult to imagine living without either of them. But a case can be made that the telegraph was just as impactful. The telegraph, for…
Many people complain that they get too many emails and there’s even a phenomenon called Inbox Zero. But do we really get that many emails? And do we really want fewer emails? In the book The Tyranny of Email, John Freeman claims the average office worker “sends and receives two hundred emails a day.” According…
Welcome to the future. It is a common complaint that we were promised jetpacks and flying cars but all we got was… something less cool. But the complaints are mostly unwarranted. Things that seemed like science fiction not long ago are now commonplace (or soon will be): under-the-skin GPS, 3D printing, hoverboards, lab-grown leather, self-heating…
If writing were illegal I’d be in prison. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion. — David Baldacci For most, writing isn’t a lucrative profession; it’s a passion. According to Meredith Maran, “one million manuscripts are currently searching for a U.S. publisher. One percent of these will get the nod.” But publishing a book isn’t…
Recently a colleague sent me an email which said “since you’re a lexiphile, you might like these phrases and use them in a future blog”. He included a list of 10 punny sentences like this one: Police were called to the daycare center, where a three-year-old was resisting a rest. He was right – I…
You, Sir are living in a historic time. Post-truth politics gets carefully manicured through fake news and propagated bigly via an echo chamber. By my guesstimate, everyone’s favorite bête noire is the overuse of the word ‘disruption’. Am I on fleek? There’s no reason to get your dandruff up. During a town hall meeting, Lake…