innovation culture

Yes, there can be taste in technology. But the problem is that the majority of practitioners are not consciously trying to extend nor synthesize towards improving quality of life.

Instead we are stuck in the darkest loop of identity confirmation derivatives, in order to extract and accumulate professional status for ourselves.

Taste in technology... See more

It’s critical to the mythology of the hero’s journey to establish the origin point, and like many in tech, our hero’s tend to venture West. Many American heroes have this in common.

Searching for folks with differentiating origin points, life journeys, developmental triumphs and failures → will lead us to new archetypes.

The new question becomes:... See more

I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. Demand golden coins from the geese rather than eggs. Demand platinum rather than gold.... See more

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is

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I think there is a similar fallacy for how we consider engineering organizations. Many of today’s “best practices” have been drawn from long-established internet companies like Google. However, the problem with copying their current practices on the basis of their success is that most of those companies found near-invincible business models that... See more

To these three, I’ll add my favorite new idea as a fourth: contraptionism. So that’s the 4Cs of the imperative: Courage, Clarity, Creativity, Contraptionism.

The aesthetic and ethos that we need to guide the construction of a new machine is contraptionism . Because any new societal machine will inevitably be a janky affair, not just at inception,... See more

A small amount of compromise is possible, and it is even needed with great funders. But there's no question that Parc would have failed if Bob Taylor hadn't forced Xerox to sign a legal agreement that they had to keep their hands completely off -- in all ways -- whatever we decided to do for the first 5 years.

This was the right ploy because -- as... See more