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 …
The Limitations & Dangers of Incentives
If you liked this, check out these posts:
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.…