Knowledge is relatively easy to accumulate quickly, but it also depreciates quickly. Skills are hard to win, but keep their value a little longer. David Maister Knowledge is easy. Crack open a book, peruse your New York Times app, hop over to Wikipedia—all you need is attention and retention. Easy enough! In the workplace, though, … Continue reading Accumulating skills instead of knowledge
Category: Working Life
Second-guessing “Chesterton’s Fence”
"We have to close the gate, because you always leave things as you found them." I must have been eight or nine years old, and we was headed to "the ranch"—a dude ranch in southern Arizona that my family had been vacationing at for going on four generations. The road to the ranch was a … Continue reading Second-guessing “Chesterton’s Fence”
How I declared war on “List B”
There's a great anecdote in Chuck and Dan Heath's book Decisive, about the commanding officer of a ship in the US Navy who "declares war on 'List B'." "List B" comprises the dreary, repetitive, but necessary tasks that sailors spent so much time on, such as painting (and repainting) the ship. The officer observed that … Continue reading How I declared war on “List B”
Bring on the bear!
One of the basic rules of Esquire was, if you're going to write about a bear, bring on the bear!Byron Dobell, former editor of Esquire This has to be one of my favorite insights about how to structure a piece of writing, partly because I think bears are the coolest. Bring on the bears! A … Continue reading Bring on the bear!
What if you choose not to look at our inboxes every five minutes?
Here are two quotes that have profoundly affected the way I think about my email: Your inbox is a to-do list written by someone else.Tom Chatwin One of [email's] overlooked disadvantages [is that] it is used for everything. Daniel Levitin I'm sure that my colleagues are a bit tired of hearing that first quote, which … Continue reading What if you choose not to look at our inboxes every five minutes?
Stop reading this and close those windows you’re not using
If the past 18 months have taught me anything—combining a pandemic with new parenthood—it's that multi-tasking is a myth. Between the stress of new responsibilities and the maddening lack of sleep, my attention span was shredded, and I found that I had to re-prioritize how I focused. For instance, in my previous life, I could … Continue reading Stop reading this and close those windows you’re not using
Why does bureaucracy keep growing?
Why does bureaucracy grow and grow and grow? Business consultant Ichak Adizes, in his book The Pursuit of Prime, suggests that the kudzu-like growth of bureaucracy is because bureaucracy is easy. Form is simple. There is no need to think. We have only to repeat what we are used to doing. Over time, form wins … Continue reading Why does bureaucracy keep growing?
A return to memo-writing & the “vagueness and nonsense” of conversation
In the past few weeks, I've finally had the time to dive into a couple of those big, monster projects—the type that you always talk about getting around to, but something more urgent always seems to come up. And yet here I am, with a pause in ongoing proposals (my firm is saturated with work), … Continue reading A return to memo-writing & the “vagueness and nonsense” of conversation
Being aware of metaphors that we live by
A few months ago, I skim-read Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a fairly academic treatise on the use of conceptual metaphor in language, a book regarded as seminal in the field of metaphor studies (it's a thing!) and in the more broader field of cognitive linguistics: . This short but … Continue reading Being aware of metaphors that we live by
Can you combat social loafing in large meetings?
While certain academic terms frustrate me to no end with their inscrutability—say, social anthropology's "synchronic analysis" (meaning no more than the analysis of the present, rather than the historical)—others delight with their clear identifications. One of those is social loafing. The first time I encountered this term, I knew exactly what it was referring to. … Continue reading Can you combat social loafing in large meetings?
Taylor Coe 