“So this is the landscape of the Sleeper Curve. Games that force us to probe and telescope. Television shows that require the mind to fill in the blanks, or exercise its emotional intelligence. Software that makes us sit forward, not…
Blog Archives
Book Report: Everything Bad Is Good For You
Tagged with: Everything Bad Is Good For You, John F. Kennedy, Marshall McLuhan, Richard Nixon, Sleeper Curve, Steven Johnson, The Simpsons
Posted in Books, Everything
Posted in Books, Everything
Book Report: The Ghost Map
“Epidemics create a kind of history from below: they can be world-changing, but the participants are almost inevitably ordinary folk, following their established routines, not thinking for a second about how their actions will be recorded for posterity. And of…
Tagged with: Carl Sagan, cholera, epidemiology, Henry Whitehead, Jane Jacobs, John Snow, London, maps, Stephen Jay Gould, Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map
Posted in Books, Leadership, Marketing, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Leadership, Marketing, Math and Science
Technical Communications: Stories All the Way Down
“The fractal expansion of stories does not stop when we hit facts, but when we hit common stories based on common experience. Facts are just stories we agree on.” – Mark Baker Last night was the inaugural meeting of Communitech’s Technical…
Tagged with: Carolyn O'Hara, Chip Heath, Communitech, curse of knowledge, Dan Heath, Every Page is Page One, Frank Luntz, HBR, Jean-Luc Godard, John Coleman, John Snow, Mark Baker, Nick Morgan, oxytocin, Paul J. Zak, Randall Munroe, Steven Johnson, storytelling, Technical Communications P2P, the pain with no name, Thing Explainer, xkcd
Posted in Marketing
Posted in Marketing
It’s Hard to Focus When You’re Exhausted
I’ve done a lot of travel lately: Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, England, Ukraine, Austria, Croatia, and now South Africa in just the last few weeks. In those places, I’ve had many long, detailed meetings with prospects, customers, and colleagues. During those…
Tagged with: attention, conferences, exhaustion, focus, HQers, meetings, Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson, travel
Posted in Everything, Marketing
Posted in Everything, Marketing
Book Report: Mind Wide Open
“So this is your brain, in all its multiplicity. You are part reptile, part mammal, part primate, part homo sapiens. you are a twitchy amygdala; you are a dopamine fiend; you are under the spell of oxytocin. You are an unthinkably…
Tagged with: Aldous Huxley, amygdala, attention, brain, fear, l'esprit d'escalier, Linchpin, love, Mind Wide Open, neuroscience, oxytocin, phobia, reductionism, Seth Godin, Steven Johnson, Steven Pinker, Tor Norretranders
Posted in Books, Everything, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Everything, Math and Science
Book Report: Emergence
“As our everyday life becomes increasingly populated by artificial emergence, we will find ourselves relying more and more on the logic of these systems – both in corporate America, where ‘bottom-up intelligence’ has started to replace ‘quality management’ as the…
Tagged with: ants, distributed intelligence, Emergence, General Stanley McChrystal, Jane Jacobs, Mitch Resnick, NewsRadio, slime mold, Steven Johnson, swarms, Team of Teams
Posted in Books, Everything, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Everything, Math and Science
Book Report: Where Good Ideas Come From
“A series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments. I have distilled them down into seven patterns. The more we embrace these patterns – in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office…
Tagged with: adjacent possible, Benjamin Franklin, commonplace book, Communitech, dreams, error, flow, Great Man Theory, innovation, Isaac Asimov, James Watt, Kitchener, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, NeoNurture, Sigmund Freud, Steven Johnson, Stuart Kauffman, TED, Thomas Jefferson, Waterloo, William James, William Stanley Jevons
Posted in Books, Everything, Leadership, Management, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Everything, Leadership, Management, Math and Science
Growing your career with the adjacent possible
Just because you don’t know where you’re ultimately going doesn’t mean you can’t start poking around. I didn’t know where I was going, but it was no accident that I’ve arrived. I started my career in technology as a “Quality Assurance…
Thomas Edison’s guide to high-tech product demos
“Despite this bravado, the fact remained that the finest specimen of electric light in the Edison lab couldn’t last five minutes.” Love him or hate him, we can learn a great deal from Thomas Edison. Sure, he showed up forty…
Tagged with: demonstrations, hacks, How We Got to Now, marketing, Steven Johnson, technology, Thomas Edison
Posted in Books, Marketing, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Marketing, Math and Science
Book Report: How We Got to Now
“This is a history worth telling, in part, because it allows us to see a world we generally take for granted with fresh eyes. Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with…
Tagged with: Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Charles Babbage, Clarence Birdseye, clean, cold, Elon Musk, Frederic Tudor, Galileo, glass, How We Got to Now, innovation, Leonardo Da Vinci, light, Niels Bohr, perspective, research, science, sound, Sputnik, Steven Johnson, Stuart Kauffman, technology, Thomas Edison, time
Posted in Books, Math and Science
Posted in Books, Math and Science
| How Your Brand Can S… on The Third Age of Marketin… | |
| Book Review: Brainia… on Book Report: Brainiac | |
 | Lee Brooks on Awkward Meetings – Volume… |
 | Matt Duench on Awkward Meetings – Volume… |
| Book Report: Zone to… on Doomed from Inception: The Hor… |
Leadership, Marketing...and Everything 