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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Book Reviews
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Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society
Byzantine Generals - How Many Liars Can You Tolerate
Learning From Our Mistakes
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Copy This! The Story of Kinko's
Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea offers a practical, pragmatic, and entertaining view of starting, growing, and running a multi-billion dollar business from the perspective of a guy who had to rely on his people skills and ability to listen in order to learn.
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Terry Frazier at 8:29 PM
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Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society
In short: A self-absorbed and rather shallow attempt to claim the invention of a new metaphysics around a repackaging of Buddhism, New Age emotionalism, and a variety of radical change philosophies from the 1970s onward. [More...]
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Friday, October 14, 2005
Byzantine Generals - How Many Liars Can You Tolerate
I came across this paper at the National Institute of Standards and Technology while following links looking for something else. I wonder if anyone is working on a way to apply this to politics?Byzantine generals
(classic problem)
Definition:The problem of reaching a consensus among distributed units if some of them give misleading answers. To be memorable, the problem is couched in terms of generals deciding on a common plan of attack. Some traitorous generals may lie about whether they will support a particular plan and what other generals told them. Exchanging only messages, what decision making algorithm should the generals use to reach a consensus? What percentage of liars can the algorithm tolerate and still correctly determine a consensus?
Terry Frazier at 10:38 AM
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Saturday, September 10, 2005
Learning From Our Mistakes
Ex-Microsoft project manager Scott Berkun has written a very good article on how to learn from your mistakes. The article was written in July, well before the Katrina disaster, but is even more pertinent now:[...] An illustrative example comes from the book Inviting disasters Inviting Disaster: Lessons from the edge of technology. It tells the story of a floating dormitory for oil workers in the North Sea that rolled over during the night killing over 100 people. The engineering experts quickly constructed different theories and complex explanations that focused on operational errors and management decisions.Found via Denham Grey.All of these theories were wrong. It was eventually discovered through careful analysis that weeks earlier a crack in a support structure had been painted over, instead of being reported and repaired. This stupid, simple and small mistake caused the superstructure to fail, sinking the dormitory. Without careful analysis the wrong conclusion would have been reached (e.g. smacking the Atari) and the wrong lesson would have been learned.
Until you work backwards for moments, hours or days before the actual mistake event, you probably wont see all of the contributing factors and cant learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back youll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation. You may even need to bring in an objective outsider to help sort things out. Youd never have a suspect in a crime lead the investigation, right? Then how can you completely trust yourself to investigate your own mistakes? [...]
Terry Frazier at 10:37 PM
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