innovation culture
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
worrydream.com • http://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/
alan kay
Notably, this theory completely omits the role of the real estate developer, who has a greater influence than anyone else in how a building comes together. Skyscrapers are designed by architects, but it’s the developer who conceives of the project, arranges the funding, hires the design team, and ultimately decides what the building will be. To me,... See more
Brian Potter • Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
2. Most of the newcomers to the realization that govt is paralyzed (Ezra Klein, Dunkelman etc) think that the red tape jungle can be pruned, or organized with better feedback loops (Pahlka). This is falling into Gore's pit. There's a fatal defect: the operating system is designed around legal compliance--instead of human authority to make tradeoff... See more
Free market logic describes how the laws of supply and demand incentivize providing the best goods at the lowest prices. But custom means economic decisions are made unthinkingly, outsourced to tradition, which might be political, ideological, or even aesthetic in origin. By law and in practice, the entire U.S. banking system has been fully... See more
Samo Burja • 27 Insights From Three Years of Bismarck Brief
Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:
We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes... See more
The Scholar's Stage • The Silicon Valley Canon: On the Paıdeía of the American Tech Elite
Put through that process, reality usually hits like a truck. Many concepts that sound good on paper are infeasible to implement, or simply don’t produce the expected results. It’s frustrating when that happens, of course, but the pace of experimentation and learning at a startup is unparalleled. I think this is an especially important form of rigor... See more
Jasmine Sun • exit interview
The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.
Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal Pistory