innovation culture

Metrics Are Poisoning You

This isn’t just about bad ideas, poor execution and apathy — it’s about the broader culture we’ve created around innovation. It’s become too hard to stop, reflect, interrogate and interject with fresh ideas, while KPIs run the show.

We’re not solving real problems; we’re searching for validation .

As marketer and author Rory... See more

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

Kinda want to launch an unironic, on-the-nose pro-bureaucracy discourse. Not even an apologia or defense, just straight up “bureaucracy is actually good and you morons trying to tear it down have no idea what you’re talking about or doing”

My longer-term agenda is to re-imagine and refactor bureaucratic functions and patterns into decentralized... See more

Engineering organizations today have ballooned to huge numbers of people, but these huge engineering organizations don’t exactly have a reputation for high velocity output. Some of this is the result of what happens with products at scale: it is just fundamentally faster and easier to iterate, improve, or change a product with 100 users than it is... See more

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

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Painting and sculpture are now free, inasmuch as anyone may produce any sort of creation and subsequently display it. In architecture, however, this fundamental freedom, which must be regarded as a precondition for any art, does not exist, for a person must first have a diploma in order to build. Why?

Everyone should be able to build, and as long as... See more

Americans as a whole will be frustrated and enraged if they understood just how much NEPA and other regulations are weaponized by progressives to block the government from getting anything done. Therefore the only battles the “power” faction can hope to win are internecine fights against the abundance faction. And so, a bit like the leftists with... See more

I wish patronage were widely adopted as an explicit social norm. So-called “gentleman scientists” and patron-funded scientists, such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton, were behind some of the biggest scientific advancements in the 17th through 19th centuries. I think we got a little confused with the introduction of crowdfunding in the early... See more

the emerging technologies of today should be analogized to events like Genghis Khan’s rise in the 12th and 13th centuries or the proliferation of personal ranged weapons like longbows and muskets. While the technologies themselves are interesting enough, it’s their obvious capacity for triggering entirely new evolutionary arcs for humanity that are... See more