Sublime

The behavior of each bee in a colony is governed by a simple set of rules that, through interactions with the environment and the other bees, leads to an end that was no part of any individual bee’s intention, allowing the colony as a whole to thrive—as if by an invisible wing. Put another way, bees are relatively dumb. Beehives are remarkably

1. Effective executives know where their time goes.

The bottom line is that small changes in the communication structure can affect decisions.

Each company is trying to figure out how to strategize, how much to invest, what the technology should be. In a case like that, it’s not at equilibrium.

Unified Theories of Cognition,

How do these criteria apply to the life of science? I advise my graduate students to pick a research problem that is important (so that it will matter if it is solved), but one for which they have a secret weapon that gives some prospect of success. Why a secret weapon? Because if the problem is important, other researchers as intelligent as my

Simon argued that when we are confronted with a hard problem, the cognitive limitations of the mind make rationality moot. In his view, we seek ‘good enough’ choices rather than optimal ones. He called this bounded rationality.

The idea of centralized direction may set off warning bells in a modern educated person. Why does it make sense to exercise centralized power when we know that many decisions are efficiently made on a decentralized basis? One of the great lessons of the twentieth century—the most dramatic controlled experiment in human history—was that centrally

The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.