words from a tech mavenThis is a presentation prepared for the August 2010 Austin Product Camp event. Here is the description:
Engineers in product development typically find many things to grumble about. Besides the usual “too many features, not enough time” they may feel underappreciated as people and put off by inappropriate styles of management. In large part this is [...]
This is a continuation to the preceding post, which described the stakeholder model of the corporation (or company) in opposition to the classical theory which sees the company as the property of its investors. That post concluded with the suggestion that an updated theory of property and ownership is needed which allows for new interpretations. [...]
(This post is based on an online comment to an article (posted May 14, 2010) by Prof. Uwe Reinhardt of Princeton University in the “Economix” blog of The New York Times, titled Companies: What Are They Good For? )
The classical economic view of a business, based ostensibly on the writings of Adam Smith, is [...]
An area of great frustration in today’s economy is the recruiting of high-tech professionals, particularly in computer-related fields. It is generally recognized that the system, such as it is, is broken: one posting on a job board can bring thousands of responses, forcing recruiters to rely on simple keyword searches instead of actually reading resumes [...]
To be an innovator, learn to think like a designer.
Design is not a frill, or just a matter of aesthetics. You can design, for example, a chair so as to be aesthetically pleasing, in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright, or Eero Saarinen, or Le Corbusier, or whomever, but it may not be comfortable to [...]
You may think I’m from another planet (and I might even agree with you), but I see no problem in finding ways to explain technical concepts in terms that non-techies (i.e., real people) can understand. To prove it, here’s an example. Some years ago I was writing a technology column for a weekly local West [...]
Abraham Lincoln is said to have posed the rhetorical question: “If we call a tail a leg, how many legs does a pig have?” Five? “No, four. Because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”
Consider what happens when we try to deal with new technological concepts in terms of pre-existing legal, [...]