innovation culture

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

The “Tech Right” is just one faction in a rising alliance of thinkers, policymakers, and industrialists that spans the political spectrum, united by their focus on accelerating American innovation to drive growth and global primacy. I’ll refer to this blob as the “progress coalition.”3 They are the most dynamic and interesting policy machine on the... See more

And I guess I don’t understand why anyone expects AI to make highly profitable quasi-monopolies even more profitable. How much bigger can the market for Office or Google search get? I understand that these companies feel the need to invest in AI for defensive purposes, to fend off potential competitors. But this need should if anything make them... See more

Instead, such cultural intelligence should be

leading

R&D, innovation and executive strategy.

We’re spending millions

too late

.

We’ve reversed the figure and the ground: We’re spending more time, energy and money on the attempted harmonization of an offering and culture, than we are ensuring whatever’s being produced is

even desired

and produced... See more

“A conservative is someone who stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

―

William F. Buckley

The first is procedural environmental laws . Instead of just making laws that say “don’t build things that encroach on endangered species”, like the developed nations of Europe and Asia do, America also makes laws that allow anyone and everyone to sue developers to force them to prove in court that they’re following all the relevant substantive... See more

Two parables:

First, Ezra Pound’s parable of Agassiz, from his “ABC of Reading” (incidentally one of the most underrated books about literature). I’ve preserved his quirky formatting:

No man is equipped for modern thinking until he has understood the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish:

A post-graduate student equipped with honours and diplomas went to

... See more

04. The Illusion of Progress : Action Bias leads us to believe that doing something – anything – is better than doing nothing , even when the action doesn’t actually move us forward. We equate busyness with productivity, mistaking motion for progress, and perceive novelty as innately valuable.

Note that the key phenomena are not movements. They are not collective efforts to build social capital around any particular idea or aesthetic or value. Nor are they forms of propaganda or prestige. The real core activities of culture are disciplines of craft aimed at actually achieving something great, regardless of what everyone else thinks. They... See more