Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, philosopher of social science, and a prominent thinker in systems theory, who is considered one of the most important social theorists of the 20th century.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklas_Luhmann (more)

a Wiki that has 1 writer but many readers (more)

Ben Horowitz framing: A good product manager is the CEO of the product. (more)

John Cutler: Less Herding. More Doing. Here’s a totally biased product manager tip: Be a team member. Be a participant. Less herding. More doing. (more)

see Growth Hacking

Kit Ulrich: The 6 types of Product Managers. Which one do you need? That lack of definition leads to hiring mis-steps and not understanding the superpowers and kryptonite for each type of product person. (more)

Suzie Boss agrees with Ewan McIntosh that Problem Finding is the key to effective Project Based Learning. Design Thinking provides a better framework for learning that emphasizes defining the problem at the outset. Before diving into solutions, students might first conduct focus groups, do user interviews, or conduct other research to fully understand an issue. That means they develop empathy along with ingenuity as they work through the Iterative process of generating ideas, prototyping, testing, getting user feedback, and refining solutions... "Design Thinking is not a project that one does on a Wednesday afternoon once the 'serious' learning has taken place. It's a change of Culture throughout a school that leads to better learning," he says. Before schools start making the shift to design thinking, McIntosh encourages them to conduct Action Research to fully understand the problems they want to address. Essentially, teachers and school leaders use design-thinking methods to figure out what's working in their school and what isn't. (more)

Description originally about developers who could build both the back-end and front-end, and anything else necessary to get code into production. Sometimes more generally used to refer to Generalist who Gets Things Done.

fuzzy Robot toy (more)

Dave McCusker is a Mage. (more)

Andy Hunt has been giving a talk this year on "Refactoring your WetWare". Sounds like it would be cool. Right Brain/Context, Personal Wiki, Getting Things Done (more)

Venkatesh Rao on Dan Pink's book Drive about Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation. I do wish though, that the book had dived into the why more deeply. The “Seven Deadly Flaws,” like I said, are merely a succinct restatement of the empirical results. They do not constitute an analysis. Neither does the SDT (Self Determination Theory) idea (which seems vaguely like Maslow in a new package). The book moves a little too rapidly from diagnosis to prescription. The prescription is based on an extrapolation from “carrots and sticks are bad” to “goals are bad,” a stronger assertion that I happen to agree with. But the incomplete diagnosis leads to problems at this point: we get a prescription based on the idea of “Purpose,” a close cousin of “goal” which I don’t think gets us anywhere. Purposes are merely somewhat softer and more abstract goals that sound more lofty and noble and suggest a hint of religion (as in the Christian bestseller, “The Purpose-Driven Life”). It’s just holy carrots and sticks or “mission statements” and “values.”... My theory is that adult drive is nothing more than comprehensively hooked childish curiosity that has led play down an interesting rabbit hole (or a virtuous spiral), so we end up putting in Ten K Hours of Ericssonian Deliberate Practice and turning into driven adults, Passionate about chemistry or steam engines or whatever. This argument is present in the book, but buried and lost among many other narrative threads. It should have been front-and-center. (more)

Flemming Funch excerpts Kevin Kelly review of Art And Fear (ISBN:0961454733 ). the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay. Worse Is Better to Jump Start/BootStrap an Iterative process. (more)

Patima Tantiprasut: The full stack product manager. There are probably two types of devs. Those who’ve worked with excellent Product Managers, and everyone else. (more)

Will Crichton: The Future of Notebooks: Lessons from JupyterCon (more)

cf Real-Time

One day pseudo-conference run by Pando.com. (more)

John Cutler: 4 Prioritization (Prioritize) Lessons (using Cost of Delay and CD3) Cost of Delay divided by the expected number of periods until completion.... Lesson #1: For the “most valuable stuff”, duration probably doesn’t matter as much as you think. Your focus should be on trying to incrementally exploit the opportunity. Don’t waste time prematurely converging on a design/plan for the purpose of providing a more accurate estimate. Experiment quickly to “prove out” that estimate of High Value. (more)

Mark Carranza has been keeping a list of his ideas since 1984 (PIM). His list has more than a million entries, with more than 7 million connections between entries... His program is DOS software, last updated in 1992. MX stands for memory experiment, but if you say these letters again and again you will notice another allusion (Memex). Any element in a list of thoughts can be associated with any other element. “I use it as a thought tool,” Mark says. http://quantifiedself.com/2009/09/the-social-memex/ (more)

If you can get 1000 fans to pay you $100/yr, then you make $100k/yr doing your art. The new Brand You? (more)