The history professor Nelson Lichtenstein told me, “What you can’t measure, you can’t reward,” and that may be why executives are so focused on work hours. For decades, the corporate world has been consumed with metrics. Managers love tangible measures by which they can determine success or failure. Work hours is one of the easiest ways to measure... See more
Founders are constantly asked to envision the path to a world where they’re massively successful. I propose, then, a revision of Kant’s imperative for technologists: do not work on something if you yourself do not want to live in the world where you are massively successful.3 With this reframe, we turn the question of unicorn status on its head,... See more
Compare that to the traditional way of exploring your files, where the computer is like a dutiful, but dumb, butler: "Find me that document about the chimpanzees!" That's searching. The other feels different, so different that we don't quite have a verb for it: it's riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring.