Management

How to Be a Good Representative

Are you someone who has been given (and accepted) responsibility for someone else’s well-being?  Maybe you are an elected official?  A board member? A parent?  A friend?  If so, you may resonate with the following realization I just had about my own successes and failures in the role of Representative.

I used to believe that what a Representative does is to act and react as if they were the one being represented.  I felt like my job was to get inside their head, and channel them, sort of like a medium or a conduit.  The problem with this though is it always ends badly.  Why?  Because it’s an impossible job.

Nobody can speak for you, as if they were you.  Sure, if you know one another really, really well, then at times it can seem as though they read your mind, know what’s in your heart.  But the times I have been most frustrated in any relationship is when the other person believes and acts …

Help Wanted: Social Capital Uncontractors

Are you struggling to pay for your food/home/whatever, or do you know someone who is?

If you can convince someone you are a superstar, there’s a way out.  But if you are having trouble making that case, then maybe you’d consider becoming a Social Capital Uncontractor.  What’s that, you ask?  I’m not sure, I’m making this up as I write, you can help…

Here’s my life.  I have a large and growing number of projects that I am working on, and an even larger (and more accelerating) number of projects I’d like to begin.  The critical bottlneck for me is not money but time.  It’s getting so bad that I don’t have time to even think about the management of these projects, let alone manage them.  Plus I hate managing projects and it’s definitely not my biggest strength.  I’m much better advising and asking questions that make you think differently.

On the other hand I have many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, etc. who are underemployed, by …

The Limitations & Dangers of Incentives

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Equity Micro-Investing

I’ve been having a serious discussion with two colleagues of mine about closing the gap that exists between two groups:

  1. People of my generation (40 and older) who have capital they want to invest in innovation but only know the VC for-profit-only value model and don’t have any true view into or understanding of social entrepreneurship business models;
  2. People coming out of college today (27 and younger) who are actually creating untold value for the world without taking on investors because they don’t (a) know how to attract them, and (b) have heard too many horror stories

Jay and I fall into category 1 and Michael falls into category 2.  All three of us agree that the gap above exists — due in part to rapidly declining startup costs — and represents a very real (and lucrative) investment opportunity if it can be closed properly.…

World’s Most Ambitious Crowdsource

Everyone has heard about the Large Hadron Collider, arguably the most ambitious and complex engineering project ever undertaken, anywhere.  The purpose, no less ambitious, is to answer all sorts of burning questions about the nature of the universe, including whether the Standard Model of particle physics is valid.  Given such ambition and high stakes, it would surprise most people that the LHC is managed in a collaborative manner with very little hierarchy.  Essentially it’s a giant, crowdsourced science experiment.…

Alfred Hubler on Stabilizing CAS

With his permission, I am posting an email thread between myself and Alfred Hubler.  I had contacted him on the recommendation of John Miller when Kevin and I were posting on the possibility of dampening boom-bust cycles in the financial markets through policy or other mechanisms.  Here’s what Hubler had to say:…

Executive Compensation

The main problem with executive pay is not that they are compensated too highly, but that there’s not enough pain for them personally when they do a bad job.  I propose that the top three executives in all public companies be required to invest 100% of their salary in their own stock each year, with a decaying lockup period before they can sell.…

Designing for Generosity

Clay Shirky is always a great speaker.  Here’s his Pop!Tech from last year:

Mechanical Turk

A few months ago, on a different blog I posted a method for reading books for free on Amazon. Hopefully they didn’t take offense to this but rather saw it for what I did which was a way to get people interested in a book enough to want to purchase it. But just in case Amazon has any hard feelings, I will make amends here by plugging one of their little-known but extremely powerful services called Mechanical Turk.…

Management 2.0

There is a movement afoot in the business world that parallels the growing maturity of the internet and Web 2.0. Let’s call it Management 2.0. Google is a famous example at the vanguard, notable not so much for its management innovation per se — many companies are just as innovative when it comes to management — but rather for its rapid growth, global mindshare and financial success. A Harvard Business Review issue in the winter of 2006 claimed that management innovation — not technological innovation — is now the key driver of economic value worldwide. To be sure, management innovation is enabled by new technologies, especially those involving the internet and communication. Following are some of the concepts of Management 2.0, you are encouraged to complete and refine this list.…