Google Reader Feed: My Shared Items
Jonathan Bernstein draws on Bill James to offer advice to both the Republican and Democratic parties following last week’s election: I can start not with wisdom from political science, but from the great baseball analyst Bill James, who had useful observations about both winners and losers that I think are worth learning from in the political [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: agent-structure, Business, politics | Leave a Comment »
There are many reasons why organizations (government, businesses, etc) grow dysfunctional and stagnant. One major reason lies with the promotion and retention of less capable workers. There have been a number of studies that explored this dynamic (for example, The Peter Principle, which theorizes that people are promoted as long as they are competent, which [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Business, management, signaling | 1 Comment »
The paper came out a few months ago, but NPR’s recent story reminded me of it. Essentially, a professor and graduate student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business tried to identify the linguistic signaling used by CEO’s and CFO’s during earnings calls that could be used to reliably predict when their companies were cooking the books (PDF [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Business, costly signals, fraud, language, signals | Leave a Comment »
Most everyone has heard Peter Drucker’s famous dictum “What gets measured gets done”, the implication being that unless specific behaviors and outcomes are measured they aren’t likely to be given much attention. In this month’s HBR, Dan Ariely suggests that this notion of measurement-driving-behavior explains many of the problems with current CEO behavior and suggests [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: analytics, Business, management | Leave a Comment »
Noah asks a provocative question: What if businesses came with expiration dates? Nobody wins forever. It just doesn’t happen. What we see in reality are millions of corpses of businesses and ideas that have made their impact (or not) and then petered out into oblivion without leaving much more than a memory. Some of them [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Business, Economics, game theory | 2 Comments »
Jen Prout of The Full Belmonty recently posted about the various organizational and management lessons to be learned by watching CBS’s new reality show, “Undercover Boss”. Each week, the show follows a CEO as they go undercover, posing as a new hire or trainee, working at various locations. The basic plot is that the CEO’s [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Business, management, research methodology | 1 Comment »
This month’s issue of Fast Company includes (as usual) a great column by the Heath brothers. The subject is right up my alley: using signals as diagnostic tools. As I’ve argued before, separating signal from noise and then using those signals to inform our decisions is key to good decision making regardless of the area [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: applied signaling, Business, decision making, signals | Leave a Comment »
Over lunch the other day, Noah mentioned this really interesting product that was announced at CES. It’s called Airnergy and it somehow harvests the energy emitted by nearby WiFi signals and converts it into electricity that can be used to power and recharge various devices. It reminded me of a concept I’ve been toying with [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Business, Economics, Innovation | 2 Comments »
Joel Spolsky, an entrepreneur and columnist for Inc., wrote an interesting piece last month asking whether his strategy of slow, consistent growth was actually a recipe for failure: I have always believed that there is a natural, organic rate at which a business should grow, and that if we expanded too fast, the wheels would [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: Brands, Business, Economics, LinkedIn, Strategy | 3 Comments »
Fiction
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Non-fiction
The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball
Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value
The Numbers Game
Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate
Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception
The Rational Optimist
The Quiet American
How Doctors Think
The Wisdom of Whores
Switch
Operation Mincemeat: How a Dead Man and a Bizarre Plan Fooled the Nazis and Assured an Allied Victory
