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TED.com – a treasure trove of diversity
I can’t recall how I discovered TED.com, but it was probably due to both an abundance of spare time and a lack of focus which afforded me the luxury to follow seemingly random links. From TED.com: “TED is a nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences -- the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm...
Are we really impressed by negative people?
Have you ever been impressed by a critical evaluation of a topic or a person? How about a negative critical evaluation? I have, and I was so affected. And I have also been with people who are universally critical; they were hard work, to the point where it was almost as if the will to live was, as with Harry Potter and the Dementors, being literally sucked out of my body - but that’s a story for a different day. This summary won’t provide any solutions, only some insights - the topic of the...
Organisational Stories and Myths
What are we to make of organisational stories and myths? It seems as though yarns, gossip, stories, and myths have universal appeal, but should we take them at face value as a representation of a truth, reality, or facts of an event? People such as Yiannis Gabriel study the stories we tell and the myths we perpetuate, and it turns out that stories serve deep physic purposes; stories have wish-fulfilment aspects to them that allow us to create and express emotions that might be otherwise...
Man’s Search For Meaning
I had in the recent past found many references to Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) (Wikipedia), most notably his view that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.” (Frankl, 1992, p.75). The quote is taken from Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning an introduction to logotherapy. The book is a personal account, an attempt at an objective summary of 3 years of life in...
The Halo Effect and Our Biases
The term halo effect was first used by E. A. Thorndike in 1920 (O'Neal & Mills, 1969), and refers to our error of logic of attributing characteristics to objects or people based on irrelevant traits, such as assuming one person is more intelligent than another due to the former being more attractive. The halo effect is similar to attribution errors such as assuming that a person who trips over a floor rug is clumsy as opposed to the floor rug being out of place. Attribution errors such as...
The Halo Effect – the book
Before you read another business book, read Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect … and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Rosenzweig, 2007), it could save your career. This book ranks as one of the most important books anyone, especially people in business should read. The basis of this bold assertion (not made by Rosenzweig) is the high risk that a large amount of the information with which we all make decisions is based on halo effects and business delusions, and is thus...
Thinking …
Well here goes for post number two … One of my passions is learning, especially about how the world and its infestation of humans really work. Not how you or I think the world and its infestation works, but based on verifiable evidence, how they really work. By understanding some of the deeper mechanisms of the world and of people, it is possible to understand, predict, and maybe even control some aspects of what goes on around us; at least up to the limits allowed by complexity. And that is...
First Post, the journey begins …
Hello world!