Productive Long-term Business Relationships
Venture capitalist Ben Horowitz writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things how he and fellow venture capitalist Marc Andreeseen have managed to work effectively together across three companies over eighteen years: Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each […]
Pork-making Without the Homage of a Tear
Novelist Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905) shocked the nation with a novel revealing what went on inside the stockyards and slaughterhouses of Chicago: It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of […]
What Makes Genius, Intelligence, and Creativity
Will and Ariel Durant write in The Lessons of History (1968,) If we put the problem further back, and ask what determines whether a challenge will or will not be met, the answer is that this depends upon the presence or absence of initiative and of creative individuals with clarity of mind and energy of […]
How to Lead in Times of Crisis
Leadership coach and author Lolly Daskal on how to lead in times of crisis: Most leaders believe they’re prepared to lead through a crisis. But after working with hundreds of executives as a leadership coach, I’ve found that many of them don’t fully understand what crisis leadership entails. Faced with an actual crisis playing out […]
The Gift of Understanding
American psychologist Carl Rogers writes On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1954,) When the other person is hurting, confused, troubled, anxious, alienated, terrified, or when he or she is doubtful of self-worth, uncertain as to identity, then understanding is called for. The gentle and sensitive companionship of an empathic stance provides illumination […]
How Productive Failure Leads to Better Learning
Lifehacker’s Courtney Seiter on positioning a task with a learning mindset: Doing things you suck at can still be enjoyable. Doing things you enjoy, can often lead to not sucking at them. Life is long, sucking is temporary. It harder and harder to be okay with risking failure.
Simplicity of Design, Complexity of Data
Edward Tufte in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (2001,) Good design has two key elements. Graphical elegance is often found in simplicity of design and complexity of data. Visually attractive graphics also gather power from content and interpretations beyond the immediate display of some numbers. The best graphics are about the useful and important, […]
The Scientist-Practitioner Divide
Much has been written about the scientist-practitioner divide in occupational and organizational psychology: Practitioners and researchers have often held stereotypical views of each other, with practitioners viewing researchers as interested only in methodological rigor whilst failing to concern themselves with anything in the real world, and researchers damning practitioners for embracing the latest fads, regardless […]
Fear as Our Most Enduring Relationship
Zen Buddhist priest Karen Maezen Miller writes in Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life (2010,) Fear is our first and, if we’re not careful, our last love. It is our most enduring relationship. It never leaves our side. It tells us where to go, what to wear, what to say, and what […]
Deep Acceptance
Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield writes in A Path with Heart: a Guide Through the Perils and Promises of Spiritual Life (1993): To bow to the fact of life’s sorrows and betrayals is to accept them; and from this deep gesture we discover that life is workable. As we learn to bow, we discover that the […]