Making Innovation Happen
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:51PM Unsolicited tip for media company c-levels: if your reaction to this crate of magic is “Hm. I wonder how we’d go about suing someone who ‘did this’ with our IP?” instead of, “Holy crap, clearly, this is the freaking future of entertainment,” it’s probably time to put some ramen on your Visa and start making stuff up for your LinkedIn page.
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:42PM Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, first published in 2004, remains a thought-provoking and helpful text as I continue to think about happiness (and its absence.) De Botton, "a philosopher of everyday life," seeks in this book to acknowledge the intensity of status anxiety in contemporary Western society, to explore its causes, and to suggest some means of relief. He begins with a brief set of definitions and a concise statement of his thesis:
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:36PM Author and anthropologist Grant McCracken had a good line a few months ago on the conventional wisdom about the generational divide: The other day I found myself thinking that every time I hear Millennials described: 1. the tone is that of a smug outsider. 2. the speaker is not a Millennial. I'm a Gen X executive coach who works closely with Millennial students at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and Grant's observation serves as a useful reminder of the dangers of over-generalizing, a perspective reinforced by a Millennial commenter on Grant's post: "[W]e have such fine control over our own identities that we don't need to resort to big, poorly-defined memes like generational labels." Points well taken. So with the foreknowledge that I'm getting into a "big, poorly defined meme" here, I want to talk about a concept of Grant's that isn't a generational difference per se but that has implications for Millennials and anyone who works with them. (And I sure hope I don't sound like a smug outsider, so please let me know if I do.)
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:28PM Phred Dvorak's "Theory & Practice" column in today's Wall Street Journal (subscription required) talks about the dangers of experience: "The more experience we have, the more overconfident we get," [says Kishore Sengupta, an associate professor at INSEAD who designs simulations that test for effectiveness in areas such as project management.] Alan Over, a managing consultant at U.K.-based PA Consulting Group who participated in Mr. Sengupta's simulation, says he now questions his assumptions more... "I try to force myself to be nervous," [Over] says. "Whenever I find myself falling back on what I did last time, or think I'm doing well, I try to unsettle myself." [My emphasis] I suspect Over's strategy of "forcing myself to be nervous" is an over-correction, but he's touching on an important dynamic. I've found that I'm more likely to make mistakes when I'm too comfortable, when I assume that I understand a situation because it feels familiar--in a word, when I'm settled.
Monday, March 30, 2009 at 11:10PM Humans excel at recognising faces, but how we do this has been an abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look at how and why we fail. A new study from MIT looks at a particularly striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggests that a large part of the answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image feature. The work could potentially lead to computer vision systems, for settings as diverse as industrial quality control or object and face detection. On a different front, the results and methodologies could help researchers probe face-perception skills in children with autism, who are often reported to experience difficulties analysing facial information.
