March 2015

Most companies are not in failure mode. Rather, they are trapped in a sort of slow, twisting train wreck that most people can't see and doesn't affect them day-to-day. The erosion/destruction comes as much from the inside as from external factors. - David Siegel

Exciting! Eliezer Yudkowsky's writing now available on Kindle! 

A lovely, enjoyable, intellectual journey through the land of abstraction, by Ashish Kumar. 

Wanna vs Hafta: Why Choice Works - Psychology Today article

The Science of Misremembering - You are Not So Smart

From the front lines of the California water drought: Almond farming uses as much water in one year as all of Los Angeles uses in three. 

Very exciting, please explore The Center for Open Science

We all know what caused the housing bubble to burst and trigger the Great Recession, except we're wrong. 

Is Monsanto's Roundup insecticide safe, or does it cause cancer? It's complicated, says the New York Times.

What's going on with Fortune-500 turnover? Not what most people think (hint - it's more complicated than that). 

Surprisingly, the curse of the lottery is largely a myth! 

Why your late-night emails are hurting your team - HBR article

Most startups never even see a venture capitalist, even most of the fastest-growing companies in America - short article

Fantastic: The Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science. 

Why you should publish titles with odd-numbers of list items - from the Betaworks data science team.

People have a hard time when facts confront their deep beliefs, but there are a few things we can do to loosen them - Salon.com

Dan Ariely shows that people cheat less when they are first reminded of their own moral code, and in any event they don't cheat nearly as much as they can - Wired article

Are you still doing annual forecasts and budgets? Learn about rolling forecasts. 

Adam Pisoni of Yammer on efficiency vs agility - must read. Another great manifesto. 

Watch the amazing Paul Akers teach the world about lean. 

Here it is - The Carl Sagan Bullshit Detector! 

"We don’t predict correctly what will drive our behavior and, as a consequence, we need to be more careful. What happens is you have intuitions and axioms about the world, and you assume they are perfectly correct. I think we should just start doubting our assumptions more regularly and submitting them to empirical tests." - Dan Ariely