Dive into the archives.
- WKI: Minding the Reluctant Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is as old as time. Its rules of engagement are as culturally embedded as Monday Night Football. For late-comers to entrepreneurship, our municipalities sponsor public entrepreneurship centers, our universities sponsor executive MBAs, and mini-MBAs or “boot camps” proliferate both as private enterprise and through grass-root outreach.
The Working Knowledge Initiative approaches entrepreneurship under a very [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Precarization, yesterday we didn’t have words for it.
Walking my dog earlier this week, I was reflecting on new words that attempt to capture a strange world that colleagues and clients describe everyday. It hits us directly, but is strangely at arms’ length. We read about it on blog posts, in the papers, on tv; but it is vaguely “out there”— without the [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Exercise 2 for Reluctant Entrepreneurs.
Eight arguments against trying the Working Knowledge Initiative and one reason for.
1) The premises of WKI are unreliable, untested (by me), and might discount my view of reality. Its something new— I’d prefer the tried and true. There’s nothing really wrong, anyway. Things will get better. I’ll wait to find work.
2) If my view of [...]
- On Finding a Language in the Confusion of Tongues: US Healthcare
A rather remarkable debate in my undergraduate industrial-organizational psych class forms the groundwork for these thoughts.
We begin with trying to think through the implications of David Brooks’ critique of Obama’s healthcare intiative in the NY Times a week ago. Not surprisingly, the effect of thought across a group of 27 individuals was to generate a [...]
- Sunny Skies and Hurricanes: Dress For the Weather
Today’s economic weather according to Bloomberg is simultaneous sunny skies and hurricanes. As kids prepare to return to grammar school today, I’m reminded of parents’ concerns that they are dressed appropriately for the weather.
But as investors (and yes, tattered holders of 401-k’s, up 50% from their Springtime lows), how do we?
The fly in the ointment [...]
- Learning from Our Reflections on Thought
I have suggested in this blog that the constructive activity of curating —- of laying out the elements of what we think and know and extracting a whole picture from the parts— is an essential movement in creative thought.
Sometimes, in a productive work team, a similar process occurs as multiple members’ contributions create a [...]
- Green Shoots of Knowledge
Something looked terribly familiar about the article by Gillian Tett in the Financial Times. It nagged at me for a day until I checked back in my blog archives and found that I’d been thinking along the same lines— that the models we use to understand our business world seem to be broken. That means [...]
- Organizational Corrosion 2: Follow the Money
In my last post, I wrote about a disturbingly corrosive organizational trend in which decisions with strong impact upon organizational clients are treated as “business as usual”. While these clients are not always an organization’s end use customers, but rather potential partners in service delivery, the aura of unreflective action may strongly shape negative perception [...]
- The Corrosion of Organizational Character
We live in an era of turbulence as our assumptions of institutional stability are challenged. Typically, we are reminded with the headlines of our morning newspapers that particular institutions or their agents are the fault. From the patently illegal misrepresentation of Madoff to the squeaky clean optimization by financial organizations of their own bottom lines, [...]
