“Specialists are people who know more and more about less and less, until they know everything about nothing. Generalists are people who know less and less about more and more, until they know nothing about everything.”Likely source: Robert E. Swain Yes, those sentences are intended to be humorous but we can’t help but recognize an…
“We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back […] In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one of them to gain an easier life.” A few years ago, I was visiting colleagues in Bangalore when the subject of…
One rainy afternoon I was watching a re-run of a detective show when I began to think about the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt.” How much doubt, I wondered, is reasonable? If you have an analytics background, you might fall prey to the temptation of trying to quantify the doubt. Using the language of statistics,…
Remember the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster? In 1986, there was an accident during a test at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in the Ukraine and the resulting explosion released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere. The radiation released was 400 times the radiation produced by the bombing of Hiroshima during World…
Not long after I joined my last employer, a colleague provided me with an incredibly important insight on how to get things done. Informal networks, she explained, were much stronger than the official hierarchy. Top-down decisions were usually met with questions which delayed their implementation. On the other hand, powerfully-connected people could implement decisions virally…
For much of my career, I’ve argued that people design key performance indicators (KPIs) incorrectly. One of my own favorite blogs made the case that, unless you compare yourself against some external benchmark, you might be making progress towards achieving your KPIs but actually losing ground. Simplistically, if you’re growing by 20% and the market…
Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. — Origin unclear In American slang, the rat race is a term used to describe the exhausting, never-ending pursuit of getting ahead financially that leaves no time for relaxation or enjoyment. By saddling ourselves with heavy debts, we are forced to continue working at…
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…
In the late 80’s, I watched many episodes of The Ray Bradbury Theater – a television series adaptation of the works of the science fiction writer, Ray Bradbury. For a few years, my friends and I gathered on Friday nights to watch it live; there was no binge-watching in those days and no one ever…
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…