co-founder/CEO Salesforce.com

Ed Zitron: Disruption Killed Innovation. The reason that none of these products seem to ever have a firm connection to any real use case or product is that these announcements are not for customers. Marc Benioff’s 2019 announcement of “full blockchain” (for Salesforce.com) coincided with a brief bull run in cryptocurrency. (more)

writer, PR guy https://www.wheresyoured.at/

Tom Standage wrote about 6 drinks that changed Civilization: Beer, Wine, spirits, Coffee, tea, Coca-Cola.

author of The Unaccountability Machine

from the Republican Party to SDS to the Libertarian Party (more)

Mutualism guru http://mutualist.blogspot.com (more)

free ebook by Bob Marshall (PDF) https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/product-aikido/ The essence of product development is an intense and ongoing struggle between organizing intent and entropy. Organizing intent is the will of the company, manifest in the actions of its product development people, bent on meeting the goals of the company through the creation and evolution of products and product features. (more)

Ed Zitron: The Man Who Killed Google Search. The story begins on February 5th 2019, when Ben Gomes, Google’s head of search, had a problem. (more)

Ed Zitron: Managing Up. Over the last two newsletters (three, if you include my reply to Google’s “rebuttal” of the Prabhakar Raghavan newsletter), I’ve made the case that while rot economics are responsible for making technology products manifestly worse, this transformation was only possible thanks to the interventions of a managerial class. (more)

Lu Wilson on Arroost: Unblocking creation with friends. Live Coding is uniquely suited to creative work. It can remove many of the creative blockers that individuals experience when trying to produce it. But we could place much more explicit emphasis on the removal of emotional blockers from the creative process, as opposed to only focusing on intellectual blockers. Arroost is a project that seeks to do that — an experimental live programming tool for making music. (more)

idea of a variation/subset of the World Wide Web which has fewer of the ugly bits (Small World) (more)

All Models Are Wrong, But Some Are Useful... sometimes (more)

Jason Kerwin: Nothing Scales. I recently posted a working paper where we argue that appointments can substitute for financial commitment devices. (more)

Theory Of Constraints, Agile Software Development writer... (more)

Michael Watkins on not getting tenure, and what's happening at MBA programs. I have been wondering for some time: To what extent are business schools producing insights of use to practicing managers? Is the investment that they are making in research justified in terms of results? Is the HBS (Harvard Business School) brand at risk? I believe that the answers to these questions are, respectively, little, no, and very much so. I further believe that this is the result of the "capture" of business schools (including unfortunately and increasingly HBS) by discipline-oriented academics who consume more value from their institutions than they create for them... Go too far in the direction of practice and you become a consulting/training company. Go too far in the direction of academic respectability and you become irrelevant. The latter has been the fate of many of the business schools at leading universities - they rarely produce cutting-edge thinking that impacts business practice (take a look at the top 250 books on management at Barnes and Noble and note how few are written by business school academics.) Jim Collins, the author of Good To Great, for example, was essentially fired by Stanford... In an HBS faculty meeting a year or so ago, the then Senior Associate Dean in charge of Executive Programs gave a sobering presentation on the state of HBS's open enrollment executive program offerings. The gist of the presentation, as I heard it, was that HBS was attracting fewer and fewer managers from leading US companies in growth industries and more from (1) non-leading companies in stagnant industries, and (2) international participants who continued to see the HBS brand as very attractive. To me, this was a clear warning sign of creeping erosion of the HBS brand...

Peter Schwartz has a new (June2003) book Inevitable Surprises (ISBN:1592400272). (more)

Number Two Son is doing NaNoWriMo for school (TAG). Being in 4th grade, his target is only 20k words. (more)

A nice profile of the TAG programs in the Barrington Il Public School system.Worse than students not being challenged or interested in school, the teachers and administrators agree, is students assuming that learning always will come easily. Julie says that bright students who haven't been nurtured or challenged by a gifted program at an early age often come undone when they enter high school or college and the academic load suddenly becomes demanding. Georgia Nelson says that when students learn without having to try, one consequence is a belief that trying to learn is a sign of Failure... Currently, 760 students in third to eighth grade are in the extended services program, which includes extended art classes. Keeping track of the number of gifted students at Barrington High School becomes difficult, she says, because of the overlap among honors, honors gifted, and Advanced Placement classes. The only real gifted program is the grades 3-5 program, which has ~50 kids total, out of ~3k kids in the district in those grades.

This is a copy of an email I just received from Number Two Son's fifth-grade (Elementary School) teacher - this is Barrington Il's Public School TAG program. I think it captures the awesomeness of the Self Contained program there... (see also 2009-10-15-BarringtonTag) (more)