Some Notes On Thinking, Fast and Slow
Written by Jamie Friday, 18 May 2012 13:55
I was at work, last week, having a coaching session with my colleague, Mark. He told me he was reading Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. I had this book on my reading list and had planned to start it today and try to finish it this weekend. However, I was inspired enough to start last weekend, not least because I am trying to find some common ground for Mark and I to build our coaching around. I have read the first few chapters and wanted to make some notes while the ideas were fresh in my mind.
How Does a Manager Use Temporal Structures to Make Their Life Easier
Written by Jamie Sunday, 15 April 2012 11:36
Many managers, no matter how talented, don’t understand how structures create behaviour. Churchill said something like the following: we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us. It’s the same for the static and temporal structures in our offices. We - or someone - at first shapes them and they in turn shape us. Getting the design of structures right, then, is a skill that many managers need to understand. When they understand it, their lives get easier. The question I want to answer today is: how does a temporal structure aid a manager in his day job? In order to answer that question, I have to first answer these two:- What is a manager?
- What is a temporal structure?
Trust is a Function of Conformity
Written by Jamie Wednesday, 28 March 2012 15:50
Many of my clients want their staff to work more autonomously. The problem, my clients tell me, is that their staff are not to be trusted. This lack of trust is usually synonymous with unreliability, poor results, late delivery, and things like that. You could say, then, that someone is not trustworthy when they do not conform to (an often unwritten) code of conduct.
The Good Old Days
Written by Jamie Wednesday, 25 January 2012 19:29
Most of society’s gains, such as the increase of rights for women and the working classes, just like the technological gains we’ve made, such as the free telephone calls we can now make, are usually taken for granted. In order to understand this, I like to think about the good old days. My father used to say that the good old days were awful. His family had no money, no food, each bedroom was crowded. There were old days, he used to say, but none of them were very good.
In Pursuit of an Acceptance of Human Nature
Written by Jamie Tuesday, 24 January 2012 10:21
In 1980, Geert Hofstede published a book called Culture’s Consequences. He had been lucky enough to gain access to a huge survey that IBM had carried out against its employees. Hofstede was able to draw some conclusions about different countries, including the distance between ‘the man on the street’ and a member of the ruling class. He called this the Power Distance and compared countries to each other in what he called the Power Distance Index. This is what he had to say about leaders from different countries:
The Free and Open Web Is dead, Long Live Commerce
Written by Jorrit Thursday, 12 January 2012 11:15
Yesterday the Dutch courts ruled that access to The Pirate Bay should be blocked by the Internet Service Providers XS4All and Ziggo. The courts are usually there to protect our freedoms, but this time something has gone wrong. Article 7 of the Dutch constitution and this European legislation clearly state that we as Dutch and European citizens have the right to unrestricted access to the internet. So why has the court ruled in favor of Stichting Brein and ordered ISPs to block the site? Can it be because Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Norway, China, Sweden and United Kingdom have previously done so? Maybe it's because the music industry, represented by stichting Brien, has a large commercial drive?
Reference
Court ruling in Dutch available here:
http://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Den-Haag/Nieuws/Pages/Ziggo-en-XS4ALL-moeten-toegang-tot-The-Pirate-Bay-blokkeren.aspx
Translation of the Court ruling in English available here:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http://www.rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Den-Haag/Nieuws/Pages/Ziggo-en-XS4ALL-moeten-toegang-tot-The-Pirate-Bay-blokkeren.aspx&act=url
Tweakers news post on ruling in Dutch available here:
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/79266/ziggo-en-xs4all-moeten-the-pirate-bay-blokkeren.html
Translation of the Tweakers post in English available here:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F79266%2Fziggo-en-xs4all-moeten-the-pirate-bay-blokkeren.html&act=url
Conformity in the Global Village
Written by Jamie Sunday, 08 January 2012 15:58
I saw a film once, I don’t know where, about the effects of violent television on the behaviour of children. Some kids were shown a video of a teddy bear being nurtured by one of the experimenters. Later, when the children were left with the teddy bear, they nurtured it, too. A different kid, who had seen violence perpetrated against the bear, as soon as he could, beat the shit out of it.
Why Software Projects In Finance Fail; Or, I Really Do Hate Your Guts
Written by Jamie Monday, 02 January 2012 10:47
Software professionals usually can’t stand financial engineers. It’s not just that their code is bad and their manner strange, they are also pompous and often arrogant. The feeling of course is utterly mutual but in return the financial engineer throws derision into his hatred: he knows it’s harder to become a financial engineer than a software engineer and he knows he earns more.
The True Nature of Knowledge Acquisition
Written by Jamie Friday, 30 December 2011 08:20
The first proper attempt to formalise knowledge acquisition was called deduction. Deduction is a demonstration of a fact arrived at by logical reasoning. For example:
All Greeks are mortal
Socrates is a Greek
Therefore, Socrates is a mortal.
It's Not a Computer
Written by Jamie Tuesday, 27 December 2011 10:19
Back in the day we had big computers, expensive things, and users took turns with them. For example, users – you could call them programmers – would gather their ideas on punch cards, patiently wait their turn, feed the cards into the computer and wait for the results. This time share may same strange to us, old fashioned, yet I’ve seen this pattern twice in my own lifetime. Firstly, Brendan, my brother, and I shared a Commodore 64. Our programs, collected on tapes this time, could only be fed into the machine one at a time. Secondly, as a student in Edinburgh, I shared a super computer with other students in exactly the same manner.
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