You won’t see or hear from me online for a week or so — that means no email or anything. I’m moving this weekend, and I should’ve remembered it takes 8 days for the cable company to dispatch a communications technician to my residence to perform a service installation. Anyway, it’s good to do a [...]
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Yet another new version of my homepage. Some changes to point out: 1. De-emphasizing ‘Brian Frank’ and focusing on ‘Open Conceptual.’ 2. The upfront email contact (for people I don’t already know) is now connect@openconceptual.com instead of my silly gmail address. 3. I was thrilled to discover that some of the essay excerpts can be [...]
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“Is everything old new again?” asks Tom Davenport, pointing to an article about a surprising increase in postcard sales in the UK. He goes on to wonder whether we might see a return to so-called “old” business practices, such as regulation and “paternalistic” management. The postcard thing reminded me of an article I read in [...]
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Just a few remarks to sum up my last two posts. I don’t think we’ll ever see the end of gasoline in our lifetime, but we will almost certainly see it become marginalized. We Our grandchildren won’t tow powerboats behind SUV’s hundreds of kilometres to the lake to go around in circles all day. That [...]
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Thomas Friedman wrote an enlightening article on the current energy shock (represented by US$4.11 gasoline), relating it with the terrorist shock of 2001: “9/11 and 4/11.” Friedman argues that gas is a dirty addiction — like crack — with a “whole set of toxic” side effects, and the worst thing the government could do is [...]
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Just saw this interesting piece in The Onion: “Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble to Invest In” (via aldaily). It seems to have a double irony: the last laugh is on people who read (or wrote) it as straightforward satire. “The U.S. economy cannot survive on sound investments alone,” is a texbook truth. The U.S. economy [...]
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Tammy Erickson writes some interesting things about changing demographics at her Harvard Business blog, Across the Ages. Her most recent post considers how this year’s events will affect the “mental models” of the present cohort of 11 – 13 year olds. 2008 is definitely a remarkable year, with no dearth of excuses to bandy the [...]
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Recently I was fortunate to learn about Innovation Exchange from someone closely involved: IX is an “online open innovation marketplace” that connects potential innovators with challenges sponsored by major companies and nonprofits. One of their strengths is they will actually facilitate teamwork and collaboration on innovation proposals as part of the process… The value of [...]
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My first essay in months is now up at blog.openconceptual.com. It introduces a new “theory of human nature” I conceived a few years ago. It was kind of a foolish undertaking — though not so foolish in light of many of the poor ideas about human nature that prevail. If nothing else, the essay makes [...]
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The notion of ‘will to relevance’ has been appearing in my notebooks since March 2005; as one of my oldest and most important background concepts, it’s overdue for at least a semi-articulate public treatment. I’m preserving the grammatically incorrect phrasing in order to authentically convey the original purpose and spirit of the concept; it’s an [...]
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It’s good to see a well known business intellectual like Tom Davenport showing skepticism towards the popular business press: “This content churn is perhaps responsible for the fact that nothing much seems to stand out among business ideas today… The reading public for business books isn’t brain-dead; it’s just dazed and confused from the fragmentation [...]
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The Chevy Volt is turning out to be a very interesting case, deserving all the attention it’s getting — or rather, the attention is part of what makes it so interesting. It’s unusual for a major auto company to be so open about product development, especially for such an important and risky project. Judging by [...]
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