I read Competing on Analytics because my boss began swearing by it, and my conversations with her were starting to get seriously confusing. So I bought a copy, and was plowing diligently through it at a local Rochester coffee shop, when a friendly woman — your inevitable next-table laptop warrior — noticed the book, came up to me, and struck up what turned out to be a very interesting conversation (which ended with her heading off to the nearest book store, to buy herself a copy). Since I...| ribbonfarm
We humans are simpler in collectives than we are as individuals. We like to think there is a “whole greater than the sum of the parts” dynamic to human collectives, but there really isn’t. The larger the meeting, the dumber it is. If you find a large deliberative body that is acting in ways that are smarter than its size should permit, you can be sure its workings are being subverted by, say, Karl Rove. I’ll argue that larger thesis in a future article, but for now, I’ll just use t...| ribbonfarm
The catchphrase of Henry Chesbrough’s work on innovation (a doctrine called “open innovation” and described in Open Innovation, 2003, and Open Business Models, 2006), is “not all the smart people work for you.” The key operational message that corporations seem to take away from it though, is “buy and sell intellectual property vigorously and throw some money at universities.” Somewhere along the way unfortunately, a sophisticated reconstruction of the logic of innovation become...| ribbonfarm