Your search results

To enjoy consistently superior performance, you need to know where to focus your practice.

Our ability to understand issues is increasing exponentially but our mental hardwiring isn’t being upgraded. We understand more every day but instinctively respond to events like monkeys.

Can a group of eclectic and divergent innovators pick winners in ways “experienced” veterans can’t? Is experience all it’s made out to be when the game is new ventures?

I keep running into amazing people. Each one stuck in a job that uses a tiny part of what they’re great at. Here’s a plan to use a bit more.

Here’s an unsolved riddle: How do we get the minds of widely dispersed, brilliant people to focus on critical problems/opportunities? How do we synchronize greatness?

Dave Pollard brought this up a few days ago. He writes:

“……

Innovative brilliance is fortuitous. It’s an accident. The challenge is moving beyond serendipity and to intention.

When do we get to play? Why does brilliance need an excuse?

Thoreau’s prose turned to poetry:

it is only when we forget
all our learning
that we begin to know.

to conceive
with total apprehension
approach it as something
totally
strange.

if you…

Might seeking a future be short-sighted if it keeps us from seeing where we are?

So, I’ve been fiddling lately. Toying. Poking and prodding. A bit itchy I guess. I want to play a little. Something related to biomimicry I think.

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the study and imitation of nature. Taking inspiration for…

So, I’ve been fiddling lately. Toying really. Poking and prodding. Dilly-dallying. A bit itchy actually. I’d like to play a little. Something related to biomimicry I think.

Biomimicry or biomimetics is the study and imitation of nature. Taking inspiration…

Introversion isn’t bad, it just has consequences.

The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Stuff I haven’t read that I think I ought to:

Wicked problems: Beyond Innovation: Richard at cph127 on peripheral vision, pattern experience, and solutions as questions when beating down wicked problems.

Technorati faves: I don’t get…

Pursuing definitive answers often erodes principles.

To see further, stand on giants.

I’ve been thinking about the things corporate salary-type folks could learn from entrepreneurs. It’s actually an old idea of mine … not really an idea I guess … more of a recognition — entrepreneurs have lots to teach innovators within…

[posted January 16, 2006]

Below is the purpose I had for sift when I started this experiment.

I’m still all in on those ideas but I think the purpose is quickly evolving away from purely entrepreneurs and purely business. Just…

Men’s Journal is no steadfast literary friend but I am fascinated by napping, so here’s their article.

It’s almost worth a wheelbarrow, no?  Heck yeah, toss’er in.

A good nap is:

- Had in the morning

…

In a Google-world, owning anything text based is a stretch. But somehow, Warren Buffet (renown investor, maker/breaker of fortunes, and deity of the stock exchange) has cornered the market on the phrase “circle of competence”.

“The most important thing in

…

While I haven’t been posting at all, I have kept up on my reading. This post by Dave Pollard is worth noting.

Dave has an incredible capacity for synthesis and generating copious insights across a wide range of…

I’ve been given several great career options recently. Two were particularly fetching:

1. Stay in government but raise the game to another level — Start helping the highest level bureaucrats identify, learn about, and build strategies on long-range issues facing…

I love used bookstores; the messier the better. The owner can’t possibly know the value of all the books when they’re piled willy-nilly around the joint. I feel like a thief, pawing through the dark corners, earnestly listening for the…

Be huge in a small place. Be excellent in a big way. Look outside for innovation and inside for delivery.

Non-business books can teach us a lot about business.

Philip Pullman, Common sense has much to learn from moonshine in the Guardian:

“It’s when we do this foolish, time-consuming, romantic, quixotic, childlike thing called play that we are most practical, most useful, and most firmly grounded in reality, because

…

In Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future, Peter Senge and others asked leading scientists and business and social entrepreneurs, “What question lies at the heart of your work?”

Jumps out out at you eh?

Makes…

From the book, Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices, by Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria:

Lawrence and Nohria spin together lessons from biology and social sciences to describe a theory of human nature. The lessons they highlight apply to…

Cluetrain Manifesto, David Weinburger:

“We don’t need more information. We don’t need better information. We don’t need automatically filtered and summarized information. We need understanding. We desperately want to understand what’s going on in our business, in our

…

I followed the crowd of slavering Hugh fans to Creating Passionate Users cause, you know, I want to be cool too.

Blind enthusiasm is being replaced by a healthy criticism of Hugh’s, and now Kathy’s, arguments. Headlines like…

I’ve been reading a fabricated debate at Slate between James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, and Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink. I’ll be revising this post, I wanted to get it up…

A few days ago I met one of life’s undeclared mentors. One of those people that have seen so much, done so much, and achieved so much that nearly every idea is weighted with a multitude of applications.

One thing…

I’ve written before on the cross-over from science into business and cited with gushing enthusiasm the insights of Edward O. Wilson. I’ve just finished reading Veran Allee’s book the Future of Knowledge. Her book…

We all have our cycles. Evelyn Rodriguez talks about innovation, insight and the incubation thereof. We face a world of difficult challenges. Shouldn’t we know more about the nature of human innovation? The economic significance of a better understanding is difficult to overestimate.

A.H. Maslow called for revolution in the ways we edify our children. He sought alternatives to redeem the many ways in which creativity is daily pounded from us. And of all he suggested, I can see none that we’ve adopted.

Teach people to listen to their own tastes. Most people don’t do it.

In the 2 September 2004 issue of Nature , Sarah Tomlin describes her recent cross-walk between physics and music. The opportunity came when she was invited to hear the product of Piers Coleman, a theoretical physicist at Rutgers…

Karen Rader just published Making Mice (Princeton University Press, 2004). In the book Karen chronicles three themes – mice, genetic engineer and mice breeder Clarence Cook Little, and Little’s laboratory. Little repeatedly characterised his work as research but…