September 11, 2001. I remember staying up past midnight, flipping through my hundred or so cable channels. Everything covered the attack. I went for a walk. TV light flickered from windows of every house. Everyone was up but nobody was out. Except one guy, on a payphone, highlighted by a street light glowing over him, speaking [...]
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change,
history,
osama bin laden,
perspective,
tv,
twitter,
war
“You changed your website again?” “I know, I can’t help it. Once a year I get bored on some Saturday night so I start tweaking stuff and one thing leads to another and 10 hours later I’ve been up all night changing basically everything.” “Haha — you’re an idiot.” I love her honesty. “I like it! [...]
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2011,
change,
design,
dialogs,
personal,
web,
website,
writing
I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
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change,
evolution,
facebook,
future,
generativity,
meaning,
philosophy,
progress,
social media,
society,
technology,
twitter
A few years ago I started developing what I call the “open conceptual enterprise.” The idea is that we need to rethink our basic assumptions about business not just in the context of different kinds of businesses but in the context of all types of human enterprise. By “enterprise” I mean the general impulse to [...]
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business models,
change,
collaboration,
enterprise,
enterprise modeling,
entrepreneurship,
google,
org theory,
organizational culture,
organizations,
philosophy of enterprise,
purpose,
social entrepreneurship,
web
Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.” I’ve been able to get some leverage on that [...]
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awe,
change,
emotions,
experience,
henry adams,
jacques barzun,
machines,
religion,
society,
technology,
utopias
It’s amazing how much insight and inspiration can come from babies, as I was reminded after visiting my seven week-old nephew yesterday. Most of time we were there we listened to “the baby’s music” which is supposed to make him happy (I’m a baby-newbie so forgive me if I’m embarrassing myself), but it made the [...]
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babies,
behaviour,
change,
development,
emotions,
groups,
growth,
learning,
mood,
music,
nurturing,
psychology,
relationships,
social,
switch
Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time. What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and [...]
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change,
culture,
history,
invention,
psychology,
remix,
transformation
The lesson of the economic crisis ought to have been that there’s a lot of inherent uncertainty. Always has been and always will be. Even when we assume things are certain, or nearly certain. The problems were all caused or enabled by people having too much faith in the bets they were making, in the [...]
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biases,
change,
crisis,
finance,
great reset,
irrational exuberance,
mindsets,
recovery,
self-serving bias,
uncertainty
I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
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advertising,
blogging,
change,
craft,
craftsmanship,
discipline,
learning,
marketing,
persuasion,
philosophy,
quotes,
rhetoric,
writing
Let’s be honest: G7, G8, and G20 meetings have historically accomplished very little. They’re big, expensive opportunities for powerful people to get their pictures taken, trying to remind everyone how important they are (or how important they suppose themselves to be). We’ve known this for a long time. We should also admit that the corresponding [...]
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change,
collaborative democracy,
g20,
g8,
global politics,
open society,
politics,
protests,
social justice,
toronto
A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
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change,
clay shirky,
generativity,
ideas,
institutions,
kevin kelly,
organizations,
relationships,
relevance,
theories,
trust,
will to relevance
Ken Robinson’s 2010 TED talk is up titled, “Bring on the learning revolution!“ (via @hjarche) Of course it is full of moving sentiments and wonderful ideas, presented with great wit, and I’ll recommend it to everyone (not that I have to, as it recommends itself)… but I think it falls short on substance: Criticizing schools is [...]
Tagged as:
change,
learning,
love of learning,
mastery,
narrative,
revolution,
video
