Management of the Absurd
Do you wonder why we obsess about categories and labels for things? It goes back to Plato, Aristotle and…
Category: Business
How To Convince Your Boss To Try Something New
Powerful people often become conservative. Once they’re in charge, it’s easy to feel that the knowledge that helped them…
How Remote Work Improves Diversity
A good question about The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com & The Future of Work from Sibylle, in a comment: I…
Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem & The Myths of Innovation (NYTimes.com)
This essay in the NYTimes, Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem by Yiren Lu, is a kaleidoscopic essay on culture divide, and the…
Big Questions for “Secret Ingredient for Success” (NYTimes)
Ranting about opinion pieces isn’t generally worthwhile, but some pieces are deeply flawed and popular enough that they demand…
Working For Free: An Argument
Tim Krieder, author of the excellent We Learn Nothing, wrote in the NYTimes about the mistake of working for…
Would you hire me? Resume from 1994
In going through old boxes I found this resume from 1994. And a wave of bad memories returned. I had…
How to Build A Billion Dollar Company (A critique)
A recent post called The Surest way to build a billion dollar company by James Slavet tries to look at…
Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds
[Note: this post was first published at Harvard Business Review and has been edited] If I could give every…
9 ways to understand how ideas spread
A reader named Niko, who is working on a PhD in social network analysis, asked me for my favorite…
Does dedicated innovation time work?
I wrote a popular post awhile ago with an analysis on the Google’s 20% time concept. Howard Baldwin from Computerworld…
The future of outsourcing
Dave Rodenbaugh, from How to buy a website, was one of my kickstarter supporters for my latest book Mindfire, a…
Everything is a Bubble
A “bubble” is when you don’t own, or no longer own, what kept going up in price. -Nassim Nichol…
How Microsoft kills cool projects
There’s a good article detailing the death of Microsoft Courier, a tablet device project from 2009/10 led by J.…
How to give a perfect demo
There is a moment in bad product demos when everyone knows the speaker is in trouble. We watch them…
How to fix a team
If you inherit a struggling team, or wake up one day to realize your team is in trouble, here’s…
Fishing with Strawberries: on Tim O’Reilly
Tim O’Reilly is the CEO and founder of O’Reilly Media, the publisher that has printed all three of my…
The end of the killer feature
At The Economist Ideas Economy event Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, in an excellent talk about open source software,…
Should I quit my job now?
Here’s a good one from the mailbag: I am seriously considering quitting the (day) job and dedicate myself to…