One Long Corridor or Beautiful Design, Uniqueness, Perseverance, and User Engagement
Beautiful Design, Uniqueness, Perseverance, and User EngagementHave you ever been in a building with long halls that stretch and then turn. It always seems to be well lit where you’re standing and dim where the turn is. And when you reach the turn the new corridor looks the exact same? The exact same. And these are the times when no one [...]
The Advantage of Change
Change is inevitable. Sometimes its having a bagel instead of yogurt and you don’t really notice. Other times it feels like a sky diver looking back up at the plane. You’re frightened, but you’re committed. Life moves on. I’ve recently left a job, the one I’ve had for eleven years. It wasn’t easy to leave. [...]
As Time Goes By, Is the Economy Getting Better or Worse?
It’s time to look back two years ago and see what happened. The trough of the unemployment situation started October 2008 and abated some by April 2009. The losses in those months were historic: -554,000, -728,000, -673,000, -779,000, -726,000, -753,000, and -528,000. A normal really bad month is -250,000. These numbers were 3 times that. [...]
Scared of Ideas or Open to Change?
He hears the alarm clock, hits snooze, and lays there for ten minutes somewhere between sleep and awake. “In the Hall of the Mountain King” by Edvard Grieg plays: He does what I think is one of the hardest things in the world to do, he puts the first foot on the floor in the [...]
My Experience, Our Story
Every Sunday millions of Americans sit in a hard wooden pew to attend church. Regardless of the denomination the session culminates in a pastor of some kind delivering his sermon. It’s a learning situation emphasizing morals and what is expected of someone within the church community. The message is delivered usually in one of two [...]
Learning about Risk and Reward in the Marketplace
The US has a culture where commerce permeates everything. It’s practically omnipresent. Because of this many Americans unknowingly learn facets of business that other cultures do not. A Harvard
Business Review blog entry by Vijay Govindarajan called Marketplace Literacy: A Reverse Innovation
Opportunity? pulls out three aspects of business: the skill being sold, the know-how to be efficient and the know-why to be effective. Here’s an excerpt example:
Marketplace literacy itself can be viewed at three levels: the concrete level of vocational skills or a trade, the more abstract
level of business know-how, and the level of understanding, or “know-why,” about the marketplace. For instance, suppose a poor woman who knows how to cook (a vocational skill) starts a food shop. To
run the business, she needs know-how — specifically, she needs to know how to set the menu and prices, choose a location, and promote her business. She also needs “know-why” — to understand why it’s
important to be customer oriented, why to choose one location and not some other, and, ultimately, why to go into this business and not something else.
Inspiration and Institutions
Malcolm Gladwell, the author of several best sellers including a favorite of mine The Tipping Point, wrote a New Yorker article last week about the bonds of Social Networking tools like Twitter and Facebook. To explain his point he describes the fears and risks of the “sit in” generation of the 1960s. Social change at [...]
We Respond to Small Cues Very Effectively
I’m really into the potential of ubiquitous measurements. My last entry was about HP building sensors for everywhere and everything. It’s also know as the “internet of things.” The reason I think it’s coming and very powerful is because it let’s people know the impact of their actions in real time. Behaviorists have for years [...]
Data Collection is Getting Cheaper, Better, and Automated: Sensors
My last entry was about the subtle delight my Chumby brings me as a device to have around the house. The value of it is two fold: the ease of use and the ability to connect to the internet. Networking equipment is constantly getting cheaper and better, so the opportunity to innovate up the stack [...]