You’d think we would have learned by now. Over the last 50 years we have seen our best thinkers decry the state of institutional education in the Western world (yes, we usually hear this framed as a US “National” issue, but really, the socially conformist view of education is Western if not global.) There are [...]
I follow the Freakonomics blog in the New York Times online - one of the few that i do follow anymore. (Blogs have become so abundant worldwide that any opinion or commentary is cheap and available. In such an infoloaded ecology, only the relevant, compelling, and well-written rise above the noise. Relevancy and context [...]
The organizational architecture of failure
In Boxes and Arrows, March 19
There are many kinds of failure in large, complex organizations – breakdowns occur at every level of interaction, from interpersonal communication to enterprise finance. Some of these failures are everyday and even helpful, allowing us to safely and iteratively learn and improve communications and practices. Other [...]
What are the most effective ways to coordinate organizational transformation? Theories and experiences differ widely. Nearly all schools of strategic transformation assume a top-down decisionmaking style that wreaks “transformation” like a plague of new process changes across the organization. When the dust settles, it’s often the case that it was just another re-org, and now [...]
Jeffrey Sachs - Speaking on solving global problems at the Reith Lectures. He may be a one-man Club of Rome.
And how can it be, ladies and gentlemen, that we think we can be safe? We think we can be safe when we leave a billion people to struggle literally for their daily survival, the poorest [...]
In Why the Crowd Has No Wisdom I pushed several issues with the “wisdom of the crowd” idea:
1. What is distributed wisdom? Wisdom can be considered an emergent pattern of meaning from participants in a dedicated search for meaning and guidance.Collective wisdom emerges from a dialogic engagement among observers that have actually pondered a situation. [...]
Read: The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it)
Michael Raynor spoke at the business/innovation conference (aptly titled The Overlap) in June, and we received his book as a conference favor. If given a fair hearing, I expect Raynor’s book to force business practitioners to think more [...]
