Possibly because my mantra is ‘words matter’ or that I’ve been writing continuously for many years, I get asked for tips on better writing. For years, I quoted George Orwell’s advice on how to be simple and clear, including my personal favorite: If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out….
I know this will be an unpopular point of view but I’m just going to say it: Brainstorming is a bad idea that usually doesn’t work. Brainstorming advocates claim groups of people are more likely to find solutions to problems than individuals working alone. The idea was popularized in the 1950’s by advertising executive Alex…
Q: What do the Southwest Airlines boarding process and the video game Halo have in common?A: They both rely on swarm intelligence to improve their experience. Swarm intelligence describes the behavior of a population of simple agents whose aggregate behavior exhibits intelligence unknown to the individual agents. Groups exhibiting swarm intelligence have no central leader…
There is both an art and science to timing decisions. In the book Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argued we should trust our snap judgments to make decision. He used examples from science, advertising, medicine and music to show that spontaneous decisions were as good as, and often better than, carefully considered ones. While Blink became a…
Which is better, passion or productivity? Recently, a senior executive told me about a new technique his company was using to motivate employees. The idea was to cultivate passionate employees who believe in what they are doing with an almost religious zeal. Passionate employees, he claimed, are more likely to do a good job. Given my performance…
Lake Woebegone is a fictional Minnesota town on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion which is described as a place “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Lake Woebegone may be fictional but the tendency of people to overestimate their own positive qualities and…
I prefer one-on-one instruction or small group trainings to learning from books. This might be because I went to a very small high school with a graduating class of 13 or because I like to explore topics by asking questions. Given my background, I’ve always believed that smaller classes are more effective; more individualized interactions…
I believe every manager is a member of three teams: The people that report to that manager. This is usually what someone means when they refer to “my team.” The external stakeholders in other departments they work with every day. For example, marketing is often considered part of the extended team for sales or development. Their peers…
The February 2012 edition of Esquire Magazine contains a feature called “79 Things We Can All Agree On” which ranges from the assertion we were better off during Bill Clinton’s presidency (#1) to things are not so bad now (#79). Regardless of your politics, the list is one part humor and one part intentional controversy. We…
My first real job was a software developer in a start-up that built massively-parallel supercomputers; the machines had up to 16K processors and handled very large datasets. While the company was staffed with seasoned hardware types, many of us software developers were relatively inexperienced. Not wanting to admit our greenness, we usually tried to solve problems…