Systems

Sometimes you get an idea that you want to explore and you propose a presentation topic on it – and it gets accepted. Well, maybe that doesn’t happen to you but I do it occasionally. It allows me to test what folks are interested in. In this case, I h...

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is how the saying goes. The saying ignores broken bones or other frailties that are not sufficient to cause death. However, the heart of this cliché is what Taleb explains in Antifragile: Things That Gain fr...

As I began reading The Black Swan, my wife wondered if the black swan was a dancer in swan lake. I’ll assure you, my reading hasn’t taken a turn into classical dancing. Instead, I’ve become intrigued by interesting events. Most of the time black swans...

I never gave much thought to economics or the economy. They always seemed like bigger issues that I couldn't impact or influence. There's no point in understanding something over which you have no influence – at least that's how my reasoning went. However, I...

There aren’t many books that I read under protest. I don’t mean protest in the sense that someone else is forcing me to read a book, as much as I mean that I’m forcing myself  to read it. The E-Myth Revisited  is one of those books that I didn’t want to rea...

It was 7th  grade. My science teacher wasn’t interested in science. It was where he got assigned to teach. It was his first year. He would read a chapter or two ahead of the class so that he could teach us. He was a good man but was in a bad spot. On...

I’ve read Malcom Gladwell’s other two works: The Tipping Point  and Blink . I figured that Outliers  would be interesting and entertaining. Why not? The other two books were. What I didn’t expect was that it would change the way I see myself and the wo...

I’m still preparing for the Information Architecture DVD that is forthcoming and I stumbled across a reference to the book The Paradox of Choice: Why Less is More by Barry Schwartz . Honestly, it felt like a reach when it came to preparing for Information Ar...

I don’t know how to stay in my lane. That’s the way I often explain to clients how and why I reach into related areas of the organization to try to support them as well. We may be focused on one technology project, but that doesn’t stop me from suppo...

There have been references spread out through many of the books that I’ve read to Richard Florida and his estimates of the number of “creatives,” people who work creatively every day. These references come back to the original version of The Rise of the...

Sometimes the people I speak with look at me funny. They tilt their head just a bit and wonder how I’m looking at problems. I know that I see things differently, but it’s normal to me. Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life  se...

When I reread The Fifth Discipline  and wrote a book review for it, I found a few references to Donella Meadows and upon further research I found the book Thinking in Systems . The book is odd in that it was published posthumously. The book draft wa...

I was recently reading a blog post titled Mild Super Power on the Dilbert Blog .  It made me think about how there are sometimes more factors at play than may be immediately obvious.  While I don’t subscribe to Scott Adam’s claim that he can avoid speedi...