I ran a new product development group within a large company and I would like to dispel the simplistic myth that big companies don’t innovate. There is innovation occurring at many big companies. The thing that big companies really struggle to do is to ship.
Technology helped us learn, but it was not the medium of learning. It was summoned when needed. Technology is strange that way. Education, at least in the K-12 range, is more about child rearing than knowledge acquisition. And since child rearing is primarily about forming character, instilling values and cultivating habits, it may be the last area to be directly augmented by technology.
Evidence shows that over the last 30,000 years there has been an overall decrease in brain size and the trend seems to be continuing. That’s because we can outsource our intelligence. I don’t need to remember as much as a Neanderthal because I have a computer. I don’t need such a dangerous and expensive-to-maintain biology any more. I would argue that humans are going to continue to get less biologically intelligent.
Very clever: Paired seven technologists with seven artists and asked them to develop something new in a day.
Tweeted by James Cham.
Great written, radio, and video pieces on the power of the Internet and the effect it is having all over the world.
The important things don’t necessarily lend themselves to the virtual or the technological. Some things can’t be easily boiled down to a set of equations or business rules. I run into this all the time when I try to develop workflows around grantmaking. It’s the subtleties that count. And, it’s the subtleties in interpersonal communications that make a conference a conference, and a meeting more than talking heads on an LCD screen.
Many restaurants use a computer system to get the orders from the customer to the kitchen. For some this method works just fine but at Le Bernardin, we still use order tickets. We have found that when a server writes the specific details of each customer’s order, there are fewer chances for a mistake to be made. Also, it helps the server to remember everything very well because when you listen and then write something, it is much easier to recall the details. Also, the tickets are easier for the kitchen to read especially if there are some special instructions from the customer regarding their order.
