Three things happened today that created a sort of nuclear reaction in my head. The result was a rather blinding flash of insight concerning a set of knotty problems I am wrangling with. The first thing was a reaction, from a colleague, to a whirlwind burst of activity I put in last night to react [...]

[Read more →]

Let’s say you go on a business trip to the city where your favorite cousin lives, who you haven’t seen for a decade. You enjoy a nice dinner together one evening. In utility terms, this is positive work-life chemistry – your company doesn’t pay anything extra, and you essentially got a freebie family visit. Or [...]

[Read more →]

For history buffs like me, a rich understanding of the temporal structure of the world is very important, almost more so than its spatial structure. Timelines to me are in some ways vastly more interesting than atlases and maps. More generally, I (like I suspect, many others), have been watching jealously while creative programmers have [...]

[Read more →]

ABDs agonize far too much about finishing, and not enough about finishing right. A successful Ph.D. experience, as opposed to a merely completed one, is one that leaves you with self-assurance, confidence in your own abilities, and full of the [...]

[Read more →]

I have previously written about/drawn cartoons about  the evolution of work-life attitudes. I also drilled down into the issue within the Gen X framing of ‘balance’ using the surfing, juggling and spinning plates metaphors. Let’s now try and visualize the ‘work-life blending’ framing. Blending inevitably involves very frequent context switching, so we need metaphors for [...]

[Read more →]

This article is an introduction to an idea — outsider innovation — whose time has come. I’ll present the idea, and along the way include short reviews of three fun books about innovation (Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko, Make us More Innovative by Jeffery Phillips, and Awake at the Wheel by Mitch Ditkoff) that belong [...]

[Read more →]

If you’ve ever used phrases like, “that’s serious food for thought” or “I need to digest that” or “there’s no meat on that argument,” you’ve used the FOOD IS THOUGHT (FIT) conceptual metaphor. In this piece, I hope to convince you that there is no such thing as information overload — it is an imaginary [...]

[Read more →]

Most people think of only one notion relating work and life: the work-life balance notion. You and I of course, are smarter, and we know that the relationship has been evolving over time.  Here’s a picture of this evolution. I’ll leave it for you to figure out how to correlate this to generational attitudes and [...]

[Read more →]

Conversations about ‘what is art?’ bore me. Conversations about ‘what is art for?’ on the other hand, I find arresting. I have a simple answer that works for me: in the ‘food for thought’ metaphor, art is the vitamin A. It is what enables your mind to see. This is not an original take on [...]

[Read more →]

A few days ago, in the course of some routine correspondence at work with a colleague at another company, I noticed his email signature: “Win Over Others | Communication | Strategic | Analytical | Activator.” In my reply, I included a postscript, “p.s.: I’d be Intellection| Strategic | Input | Context | Ideation.” If this [...]

[Read more →]