You know those people who use curse words not to insult anyone but to emphasize their message? Like a respected business man who says f%$! every few minutes in a conversation about oil futures or hiring or saving panda bears. A young mother of three living in a posh neighborhood who spices up her endless blurb about shopping and nail salons and house maids with an occasional curse.
Accuracy can easily be mistaken for usefulness. If you hire a consultant and pay them a hefty sum to come up with a detailed analysis of some key business function, the results may be impressively accurate but can also be utterly useless.
Management is the art of creating order in situations that would otherwise become chaotic. Managers do this in various ways, most of which (at the lower rungs, at least) fall in the spectrum between micromanaging and letting employees manage themselves.
In a job interview a while back, I mentioned the one word you don’t want to say in a job interview (especially when the interviewer is an ex-Googler): “intuition”. Interviewers want to hear about your analytical and well-reasoned thinking skills, not about nebulous concepts like intuition. Was mentioning “intuition” a mistake? yes. Does intuition have a place in the workplace? absolutely.
I was “commissioned” by my wife and her business partner to design a new logo for their business.
I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.
Synchronized green lights are designed to enable streamlined traffic flow in major traffic arteries. When you hit the green wave you know it – it feels like all the lights are turning green just for you. Nice as this may be for your ego, it’s just a coincidence. After commuting on a such a road for a while, I found a way for making this work almost every time.
Describing what your startup does in a video is a must. However, making a high quality video is harder and more expensive than it seems. Although video equipment is cheap, finding and filming a professional talking-head is challenging and achieving consistent quality through different scenes not trivial. Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to ensure your video is excellent without sweating it: use stop motion.
If I say that everything is awesome over and over again (and my reputation is high enough) eventually you’ll believe me. Apple executives take advantage of this in an NLP-like manner in their presentations. This video is a great demonstration of this effect.
This is one of the most amazing bookshelves I’ve ever seen. I have a thing for bookshelves, a piece of furniture that lends itself to meaningful design. The thoughtfullness and minimalism of this particular design is simply amazing. The designer’s site is here.
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