I mentioned Clayton Christensen’s new book How Will You Measure Your Life? onto my summer reading list. Here is an excerpt: The Trap of Marginal Thinking In the late 1990s, Blockbuster dominated the movie rental industry in the United States. It had stores all over the country, a significant size advantage, and what appeared to [...]
Book-notes
From The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business Chunking — The Root of Habits The process—in which the brain converts a sequence of actions into an automatic routine—is known as ‘chunking,’ and it’s at the root of how habits form. Why do Habits Emerge? Habits, scientists say, emerge [...]
Here is a wonderful excerpt on the pitfalls of hiring star performers from Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition: What is the quickest way to improve your organization’s results? Many companies, sports teams, and entertainment businesses opt for the same solution: they hire a star. At first glace, signing a star seems like a [...]
Heather Brooke, author of Your Right To Know: A Citizen’s Guide to the Freedom of Information Act, offers five picks on Holding power to account. Animal Farm …it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues [...]
An excerpt from Think Twice on unintended consequences: When you are dealing with a system that has lots of interconnected parts, tweaking one part can have unforeseen consequences for the whole. Take the example of Yellowstone National Park. In retrospect, it looks like the park’s woes started when explorers in the mid-1800’s couldn’t find enough [...]
“Fitness is the central concept in modern Darwinian genetics. It is measured simply by the rate at which an organism reproduces itself. If two organisms compete for occupancy of the same ecological niche, relative fitness determines which will survive. Even small differences in fitness can lead to enormous differences in reproductive success over only a [...]
I finally got around to reading Susanna Braund’s translation of Seneca’s De Clementia, which is well worth the read. Seneca addresses De Clementia to the young roman emperor Nero with the aim of depicting the ideal ruler. Braund goes to great lengths to establish the literary, philosophical, and political traditions that influenced the work but [...]
