This makes the third Michael Lewis book I’ve read (see also my take on Moneyball and The Blind Side from last fall). It’s another good one. Liar’s Poker is Lewis’ first book. He writes about his years on Wall Street working with the Salomon Brothers investment firm during the heady 1980s. It’s a biography of […]
When I heard that milk jugs are being redesigned for better efficiency, I felt a sort of witless glee. Part of that is my usual response to efficiency. And also because most of my high school employment was in the local Kroger, stores #444 and #432 (I still remember that…?). I mostly did night stock, […]
MagCloud is a new print-on-demand service just for magazines. I’m surprised this didn’t exist already.
I like the idea of a corporate artist in residence. Surely a few companies would buy into it?
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.
Visual thinking is […]
For one year I worked at a regular nine to five job, and I remember well the strange, cozy feeling that comes over one during meetings. I was very aware, because of the novelty, that I was being paid for programming. It seemed just amazing, as if there was a machine on my desk that […]
Shop Class as Soulcraft, an article about the value of working with your hands and the increasing assembly-line nature of knowledge work:
Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a […]
It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, […]
Business on the back of the napkin, a slideshow of basic doodling frameworks: portraits, charts, maps & timelines.
A long essay on why crunch mode doesn’t work. The gist is that productivity peaks within the first 4, 5, or 6 hours of the day, then starts dropping. Eventually it dissolves completely. In the long run, that continuous overtime isn’t helping you or your company.
I first heard about A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age when Joshua Blankenship posted this excellent quote from author Daniel Pink. Great stuff, so I found the book, which isn’t as great.
The premise is that the Information Age was led by left-brained, linear-thinkers. Now, as we enter the […]
There’s going to be a movie version of The Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis (see my review of The Surrogates). I really, really liked the comics, especially because I haven’t found a lot of decent scifi. Very cool book—I hope those Hollywood folks treat it kindly.
By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, […]
I’m really fascinated with this idea of coworking. The trend has gotten some press in NPR, Business Week, Wired, and the New York Post, among others. Folks like Jelly, Citizen Space, and Independents Hall are all doing really cool things, making a business of it. Looks like there’s a coworking group just getting started in […]
I, too, wonder why famous musicians don’t put out as much music. “I’d feel a bit cheated if they couldn’t put together more than three or four decent new tunes a year. These people are musicians, this is their job. In the mid-’60s, Bob Dylan was probably putting down three or four great new songs […]
Tim Walker writes about meme entrepreneurship. I love it. Go read it. Unless I misunderstand the point, it seems like a lot of folks are already working in that vein—writers. Just glancing at my bookshelf, there’s Florida and his Creative Class, Friedman and his Flat World, Weinberger’s Miscellany, Anderson’s Long Tail.
I don’t mean that to […]
A Toyota factory in Georgetown, Kentucky, has a fairly relentless culture of improvement: “Doing the task and doing the task better become one and the same thing. This is what it means to come to work.”
A couple artists are selling paintings of things they want. The price of the painting is the same as the item itself. The Wii painting cost $270.92.
Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn’t look like it works on the home page, but that’s pretty cool. Am I the last […]
Peter has written a lovely little piece about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows. Everybody and their mom has touched on the overthrow of the big labels and the utopian arrival of direct-to-ear music subscription, but I thought this was really perceptive:
“They can independently master their disc and shuttle straight to their service provider, with no […]
I’m prone to reading phases, veering off on thematic streaks. Do other people do this? For example, in the past year I read through the Edward Tufte corpus pretty much back-to-back (reviewed Beautiful Evidence and Envisioning Information), all but one of Steven Johnson’s (reviewed The Ghost Map, Everything Bad Is Good for You), the Scott […]
An old commercial with the Flintstones advertising Winston cigarettes—”delivers flavor 20 times a pack!” Another good smokes commercial: more doctors smoke camel than any other cigarette.
Good book. I posted a while ago about my initial doubts and then how excited I became about this book as I began to read it. It all turned out fairly well, though I think the glow is gone.
Despite the hokey title, 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich seems to […]
A pretty good interview with Seth Godin. “The thing is, the stuff that’s for everybody is already sold to everybody. So you can’t win by being more average than average, because that slot’s taken.”
You can now buy the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List in one motherlode from Amazon.
How to Be Creative, Gaping Void’s long philosophical article on life, money, art, etc.
You don’t need a plan, you need skills and a problem. Good stuff. [via svn]
A graphic exploring the connected approaches of the Specialist and the Generalist. [via michael surtees]
ATL Creatives is all about what creative people are up to in Atlanta. It’s the brainchild of Eric Shoemaker and Rick Hill.
The only other book by Don DeLillo that I’ve read is White Noise, which I thought was rather fantastic. Cosmopolis, on the other hand, I didn’t like very much at all. From the review in the Guardian: “Overall, there’s a sense of gridlock. Which is apt thematically, but tough on the reader.” Have to agree.
Del.icio.us is giving away free stuff, stickers and bookmarks and what-not. You have to snail mail them, so I’m all over it.
I just started reading The 4-Hour Work Week. I admit, in the beginning, I didn’t want to like it. Part of me wanted Tim Ferriss to be some shallow, cocky blowhard with a couple hundred pages of motivational fluff. But… he won me over by page 11 with a passing reference to J.B. Say, and […]
Lots of good stuff for sale at Coudal’s Swap Meat. I’m partial to the Ghost Prints.
Dorothy Gambrell has done some excellent illustrations based on the Schedule C table of Principal Business or Professional Activity Codes [p. 8-10, pdf].
Here’s an analysis of the economy of Second Life. Rapid, artificial inflation of the Linden dollar means a recession is due at some point. It’s hard to predict when they’ll reach it, but it seems pretty much unavoidable.
The New York Times has a new tower to work in. “Ultimately, it’s hard not to sense that the Times, so determined to have a building that makes a mark on the sky line, had a failure of nerve when it came to the interior.”
Anil Dash noticed the recent popularity of pixel graphs, citing an awful example in the New York Times and a not-as-bad one in Wired Magazine. I also recall this one from Business Week a while back, and another commenter mentioned one at Curbed today. It’ll take some time and trial & error to figure out […]
The Thing Quarterly: “Each year four artists, writers, filmmakers or musicians are invited to create a household object that somehow incorporates text. Every three months a new object will be hand wrapped in brown paper and string by the editors and mailed to subscribers.”[via jb]
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