Gadgets that are increasingly online all the time help you multitask – but is that good? Scientists say a loud “no”, according to this New York Times article. There’s reason to be skeptical of either side of this debate, but it does recall one thing: One of Waren Buffett’s overlooked skills is that of saying no to things that would disrupt his schedule, or take time away from quiet reading and “just thinking”, as he says.
It seems obvious but Dan Pink makes it interesting in this 2009 TED talk: extrinsic incentives work great for certain situations but poorly for others of higher complexity. His other point, that there’s a “mismatch between what science knows and what business does”, is also important… but trying to bridge this gap can lead to information overload if managers try to cover all the “buzzwords” for fear of missing out on the latest (supposedly) performance-enhancing method.
In the first of a series of posts, this one highlights the classic article by Robert Cialdini: “The Science of Persuasion”. It’s basically a 6-page summary for his must-read book “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”. We can’t stress enough how important the subject is – anyone interested in marketing, retail, personal relationships and, well, wants to reduce the risk of being tricked by a Madoff-like scheme should read this book.
The World Bank has released a huge wealth of data on developing economies. The impacts of such moves are never immediate and almost always underrated, and there’s the risk of data deluge. That said, things like Google indexing and an app development contest could lead to interesting uses for all this information.
There’s one aspect that seems overlooked in the whole “multidisciplinary approach” cult: communication. If you don’t have the adequate communication policies/ environment, how does one reap the rewards from all this multidisciplinary goodness? How does a team interact in order to extract value from its members’ diverse interests and skill sets?
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DARPA, the US military agency that 40 years ago spawned the Internet, organized a contest to study how people collaborate online and, most importantly, how information spreads virally through social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter. The winning team took less than 9 hours to locate 10 balloons spread throughout the US – unthinkable maybe even 5 years ago… And the implications are quite interesting.
Reading the book Empires of the Word – A Language History of the World, by Nicholas Ostler, is a great reminder that learning languages is a relevant part of the process that Charlie Munger defines as “make sure you go to bed at night a little wiser than you were when you woke up”. From [...]
Facebook is just starting to tap the immense wealth of data generated by its 300mm audience, as reported in their blog and in the New York Times (free registration required) yesterday. This particular study on the “Happiness Index” is more of a teaser, a taste of what is to come. We don’t pretend to know [...]
