Philippe Ariès, in “The Hour of Our Death,” points out that the essential characteristic of death as it appears in the “Chanson de Roland” is that the death, even if sudden or accidental, “gives advance warning of its arrival.” Gawain is asked: “Ah, good my lord, think you then so soon to die?” Gawain answers: … Read More
When you possess great treasures within you and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.
Management and leadership are like forehand and backhand – you’ll have to be good at both to win. We all have periods in our lives when our professional growth speeds up and slows down. […] we all need a bit of growth and a bit of stability in our lives and our teams. […] That … Read More
Tad’s mission in life is to have more fun than anyone else in New York City, and this involves a lot of moving around, since there is always the likelihood that where you aren’t is more fun than where you are. Jay McInerney, Bright Lights, Big City
It turned out the adjustment was easy. The Internet Explorer team at Microsoft had an equivalent, called the daily build, where we released a version of the software every day, but it was available exclusively inside the company.3 Each day all the changes from the previous day were compiled and released, and everyone was expected … Read More
To understand who people really are, start a fire. When everything is going fine, you see only the safest parts of people’s character. It’s only when something is burning that you find out who people really are. Of course, it’s wrong to set a fire on purpose, but if you have a small fire already … Read More
The game company Valve, makers of the games Half-Life and Portal, have a similar philosophy. They hire T-shaped programmers and designers—people who are masters at one craft but skilled at many. Valve also bets heavily on employee autonomy, going further than Automattic with its complete absence of formalized teams or hierarchy. Projects form at the … Read More
They’d do this work on their own time, for pleasure. In his classic book The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder noticed that Data General’s efforts to hire people with strong internal motivations changed things: “Labor was no longer coerced. Labor volunteered. When you signed up you in effect declared, ‘I want to do … Read More
on the new new thing blockchain stuff could be nothing in production yet two industries where technology “ technology has been massively deflationary in every industry except for two education and healthcare average cost to consumer has gone up over time it makes no sense new new thing because it won’t look like anything we’ve … Read More
“Thus each of us had to be content to live only for the day, alone under the vast indifference of the sky.” Albert Camus, The Plague