Written by Byron Alley on July 23, 2009 – 2:18 am
Conventional wisdom about management mistakes has changed. It’s just not cool these days to hide your blunders: the world is too transparent. The latest trend is towards admitting errors quickly and completely.
Great. It’s a step up from the blame-deflection attitudes of past decades. And leaders who calmly admit they made poor decisions can actually seem [...]
Written by Byron Alley on June 14, 2009 – 10:26 pm
If you’re a Twitter user (and it’s the “in” thing to do these days, or so I hear) do you have your latest tweets displayed on your web site?
It’s easy. I prefer the HTML widget because you can play with it a bit more within your own design, etc: http://twitter.com/widgets/html_widget
I’ve made a quick hack to [...]
Written by Byron Alley on February 25, 2009 – 1:33 pm
Thinking of life as a game makes it more fun. Some of the most interesting (and successful) people I know think of life as though there were points to be won or lost for the sheer entertainment of playing. And game theory, the study of how logic and probability influence outcomes in games, has some [...]
Written by Byron Alley on February 15, 2009 – 8:16 pm
There’s a Zen story that taught me a lot about the nature of giving and receiving:
While Seisetsu was the master of Engaku in Kamakura he required larger quarters, since those in which he was teaching were overcorwded. Umezu Seibei, a merchant of Edo, decided to donate five hundred pieces of gold called ryo toward the [...]
Written by Byron Alley on June 16, 2008 – 3:10 pm
My favourite work tool is a notebook and a pen. (Lately it’s a DeSerres notebook, which is kind of like the Moleskines but a more convenient format, and a Uni-Ball JetStream pen, which is like a gel but without the smudging.) Lately I’ve taken to slapping photos on them, partly so I can tell my [...]
Written by Byron Alley on February 8, 2008 – 9:05 pm
A rebuttal to the Tipping Point brings up interesting points, but seems to miss some important points.
Malcom Gladwell’s famous book The Tipping Point put forward the idea that small numbers of people have unusual influence on the spread of ideas and even disease. However, recent work by researcher Duncan Watts, described in an article in [...]
Written by Byron Alley on January 1, 2008 – 9:17 pm
I stumbled on this, another example where strategy of all kinds is “the same at the top.” This is a list of principles created for WWI dogfighting by the teacher of the Red Baron:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dicta_Boelcke
I find it really interesting that in business, often it’s about “fractal”-based success. That is, just as fractals are complex [...]
Written by Byron Alley on September 13, 2007 – 6:15 pm
The title of a post on Tom Peter’ blog caught my eye:
To Get Out of Bed. Or Not Get Out of Bed. That Is the Question.
This was one of the earliest business lessons I learned. When I was a university kid, I occasionally supplemented my two part-time jobs with odd jobs at $10/h with [...]
Written by Byron Alley on August 17, 2007 – 1:20 pm
Most entrepreneurs share a belief about fortune: that you make your own luck.
This self-fulfilling prophesy is backed up by science.
Keep moving. First, any successful entrepreneur will tell you that it’s all about doing things. And statistics tell us that the more things you try, the more chances you have of being “lucky” – [...]
Written by Byron Alley on June 13, 2007 – 1:55 pm
The number one complaint is lack of focus. Lack of focus means lacking a clear agenda and defined goals, but also effectively choosing the attendees. The most effective way to hold a meeting is to stick to ONE meeting style and ONE issue.