February 2012
25 posts
Why Brainstorming Doesn't Work (And Other Issues...
The key take-away from Jonah Lehrer’s The New Yorker article, “Groupthink”:
“The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions. The lesson of (this analysis) is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable...
“Technology and cheaper goods from overseas have replaced many of the...”
– Adam Davidson, The New York Times
Pvt. Danny Chen, 1992–2011 →
Adam Davidson on Manufacturing | EconTalk →
Russ Roberts’s EconTalk podcast is one of a select few that I try to catch every episode of and this one I thought was especially good, particularly for the layman. In this episode, he interviews Adam Davidson, journalist and NPR correspondent. More specifically, if you’ll recall, Adam Davidson is the author of the excellent The Atlantic article on manufacturing that I blogged about...
“Our institutions are failing — they’re failing us; failing the challenge...”
– Umair Haque
More:
“For many years now, societies have been limping on with broken institutions and splintered social contracts — right into the heart of this perfect storm. And I’d bet most of us have assumed that we’ll continue to “get by” — that we can wait for the...
Agrarian Living:Sublinear; City...
Quotes from Jonah Lehrer’s NYTimes article “A Physicist Solves The City,” which profiles the work of Geoffrey West.
1.
“When we started living in cities, we did something that had never happened before in the history of life,” West says. “We broke away from the equations of biology, all of which are sublinear. Every other creature gets slower as it gets bigger. That’s why...
WorkSnug blog: Top 5 Collaboration Tools for... →
blogsnug:
We posted exactly 26 reasons why collaboration is a good thing for virtual teams, so we know you don’t need any more convincing! But what are the best tools for collaboration? Here are our five favourites. Let us know yours in the comments.
San Sharma (@WorkSnugSan) is community…
“Individuals may be able to set aside money for the future, but not a society as...”
– Doug Henwood (via Yglesias)
There is talent everywhere. We just don’t know how... →
Poor, White, and Republican →
From George Packer’s hard-hitting New Yorker op-ed (link in title):
In the Times story, there’s a man named Ki Gulbranson from a small Minnesota town called Chisago, both barely clinging to the middle class. He tries to make ends meet selling apparel and refereeing kids’ soccer games. All around him, he sees growing dependence on government. No fan of government spending, he joined the Tea...
Greenwald: "Repulsive Progressive Hypocrisy" →
Key Quote from this irate Glenn Greenwald essay on Obama foreign policy (link in title):
“I’ve often made the case that one of the most consequential aspects of the Obama legacy is that he has transformed what was once known as “right-wing shredding of the Constitution” into bipartisan consensus, and this is exactly what I mean. When one of the two major parties supports a certain policy...
Comparing The Impact Of The Recession On Three...
From Derek Thompsons’s TheAtlantic.com post:
“Each face a particular challenge.
“For Boomers, it’s a wealth crisis. They invested in homes whose value has fallen by as much as 30 percent.
“For Gen-X, it’s an income crisis. They should be in the highest-earnings years of their life, but the recession has depressed their salaries and threatened their...
Creative Destruction Vs. Macroeconomic...
I’m pulling both of these quotes directly from Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog:
1.
From Macroresilience:
As Minsky has documented, the history of macroeconomic interventions post-WW2 has been the history of prevention of even the smallest snap-backs that are inherent to the process of creative destruction. The result is our current financial system which is as taut as it...
“The outrage is tiresome and deeply hypocritical, in all the tiresome ways you’ve...”
– Great writing. SFJ of the New Yorker.
2 quotes from John Hagel about management:
1.
“Companies are most successful when they realize that tech by itself will not achieve anything. Instead, companies have to change the way that they work.”
2.
“Change management process is not a rational process. Instead, it is a political process. It is important to understand that it is about strengthening the allies, and...
Hagel: The Evolution Of Design To Amplify Flow →
The Power of Pull co-author John Hagel on Bejan and Zane’s book, Design In Nature:
1.
The constructal law of design in nature:
“‘For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to live), its configuration must evolve in such a way that provides easier access to the currents that flow through it.’”
“‘It is a law of physics – and not just of...
Stiglitz on the lesson to be learned from the... →
1.
“Even when we fully repair the banking system, we’ll still be in deep trouble—because we were already in deep trouble. That seeming golden age of 2007 was far from a paradise… The American standard of living was sustained only by rising debt—debt so large that the U.S. savings rate had dropped to near zero… In the years leading up to the recession, according to research...
Facebook's IPO and Corporate Governance
Via Yglesias at Slate:
1.
“Formally speaking, companies are owned by their shareholders and controlled by a board of directors that’s at least theoretically supposed to look out for shareholder interests. In practice, this is often difficult.”
Example:
“The five largest shareholders in Apple, our second-largest company, are FMR, Vanguard, State Street, T. Rowe Price, and...
“The cowardice comes from not wanting to disturb the sacred status of American...”
– Take a hit of Andrew Sullivan on Washington, weed, and hypocrisy. (via cheatsheet)
“What is lacking in the recent debates about “The Future of Capitalism” is...”
– Michael Stephens
More:
“Despite the vast rise in productivity, prices have not fallen and real wages have not increased for the past generation (since the late 1970s in the United States). The economic gains have been taken by the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector, dominated...
There Will Be No Deficit Problem Unless Congress... →
On Private Equity
What it does:
“A private equity firm is an asset management company. It creates investment funds that raise most of their money from outside investors (pension funds, insurance companies, rich people, etc.), and then manages those funds. As opposed to a mutual fund, however, instead of buying individual stocks, these funds usually make large investments either in private companies or in...
January 2012
52 posts
“One must learn to love. — This is what happens to us in music: First one has to...”
– Friedrich Nietzsche, 334, Book Four, The Gay Science. (thanks to seeyoulateraggregator)
The Right Way To Think About Capitalism
A quote from Hayek:
“The main point about which there can be little doubt, is that Smith’s chief concern was not so much about what man can occasionally achieve when he was at his best, but that he should have as little opportunity as possible to do harm when he was at his worst. It would scarcely be too much to claim that the main merit of the individualism which he and his contemporaries...
“If the first half of the 20th century was a time of fundamental change in the...”
– John Kay
“In a market economy, competition rapidly leads to emulation, and high profits...”
– Harold James via Project Syndicate
“We like to think of ourselves as an innovation nation, but our government is a...”
– Alex Tabarrok
The Real Market vs. The Expectations Market
Quotes from Steve Denning’s review of Roger Martin’s Fixing the Game.
1.
The Real Market vs. The Expectations Market:
“The “real market,” Martin explains, is the world in which factories are built, products are designed and produced, real products and services are bought and sold, revenues are earned, expenses are paid, and real dollars of profit show up on the bottom...
More On Apple And The Realities Of Globalized...
Continuing with the recent series of articles (and radio shows) using Apple as a case study to highlight the myriad issues around globalization and manufacturing, here’s an excellent NYTimes piece that follows pretty much in-step with the TAL program. There are a lot of lessons to draw from it - and I really recommend reading the whole thing - but here are some key take-aways I pulled out of...
“The crisis made it glaringly obvious that the efficient market hypothesis was...”
– More from Fukuyama on the financial crisis, this time via his essay in The American Prospect.
Francis Fukuyama on the Financial Crisis →
Interview via The Browser. Here are some of my favorite ideas from it.
1.
On US Power and Democracy:
“In the US, we have increasingly concentrated economic and political power. In a democracy, that should get balanced out by the voting power of ordinary people, but that mechanism seems to have broken down. First, there has not been enough recognition of the inequality of power, and...
Private-equity firms are excellent at gaming the... →
“The question is whether there’s any reason to believe the private equity...”
– Yglesias
But there is one overwhelming problem with... →
“8.2 million American workers are employed in “production...”
– Tweets from Richard Florida
Geographic Implications Of Firms Going Global
Several very interesting thoughts from this Yglesias post:
1.
“It’s not so much that technology undermines the traditional truly small firm as that it undermines the position of the merely regional one. Once a company’s lost the distinct charms associated with genuinely small scale, then either it’s very successful and will gobble up other regional firms, or else...
“The largest share of “charitable” giving in the United States is...”
– Yglesias
Making It In America →
This is a really tremendous article on US manufacturing and the labor force from the most recent issue of The Atlantic by Adam Davidson (link in title). It’s one of my favorite long reads of the year and I recommend everyone take the time to read it:
Take Away:
“If Standard paid unskilled workers like Maddie more or hired more of them, Larry says, the company would have to charge...
The Caging Of America: Why Do We Lock Up So Many... →
A must read article by Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker that also covers some very interesting research on the inexplicable drop in crime in New York City over the past several decades.
Take Away:
“What matters (in decreasing crime) is the incidence of crime in the world, and the continuity of a culture of crime, not some “lesson learned” in prison.”
Go read it now.
“For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former...”
– From Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher’s “insanely great” NYTimes article, “How The US Lost Out On iPhone Work.” It’s a must-read for everyone.
Take-Away:
“Building the iPhone in the United States would demand much more than hiring Americans — it would...
“Service jobs are the last frontier of inefficiency, providing abundant...”
– Richard Florida from his FT.com op-ed, “America Needs To Make Its Bad Jobs Better”