Read this book and do what it says:
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
This book has influenced our thinking on website design and structure at Desiring God more than anything else we have come across.
by Matt Perman
Read this book and do what it says:
Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition
This book has influenced our thinking on website design and structure at Desiring God more than anything else we have come across.
by Matt Perman
Malcolm Gladwell’s article How David Beats Goliath is one of the 100 most interesting things I have ever read.
by Matt Perman
From his book Leadership:
I believe that if you read enough about something, you’re going to unravel its mystery, and will ultimately understand the fundamentals in a deeper way than simple observation would provide. Then, if you have an inquiring mind, you can apply yourself to that subject and have success in ways not experienced even by those who have spent much more time on it.
by Matt Perman
Goodreads seems to be worth checking out. It provides an easy, online way to keep track of what you are reading and recommend books to others.
(A recent commenter pointed pointed this out to me — thanks!)
by Matt Perman
In his book FedEx Delivers: How the World’s Leading Shipping Company Keeps Innovating and Outperforming the Competition, Madan Birla states that his experiences “with one of the most innovative companies in the history of free enterprise—FedEx—and my success in helping other companies become truly innovative” has shown him four key things about innovation:
by Matt Perman
For his book The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun researched lots of mechanisms similar to Google’s 20% time. He summarizes some observations regarding the most common misconceptions of the concept in a helpful post from a few years ago.
by Matt Perman
Tom Peters in In Search of Excellence, quoting Theodore Leviit:
The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation.
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things. . . . A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action….
If you talk to people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators.
All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. . . . The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas. . . .
by Matt Perman
In a recent column on health care, Thomas Sowell writes:
It is not uncommon for patients in those countries to have to wait for months before getting operations that Americans get within weeks, or even days, after being diagnosed with a condition that requires surgery. You can always “bring down the cost of medical care” by having a lower level of quality or availability.
That last sentence is very illuminating. You will notice the same pattern that I blogged on in regard to project management a few weeks ago. In that post, I noted that there are three constraints on anything — cost, quality, and time — and you can have two but not all three. If you need something cheap, then you will either have lower quality or a longer schedule. If you want something fast, you will either have lower quality or higher cost. And so forth.
This reality exists in health care as well as project management; it exists anywhere that you have to utilize resources. So, in regard to health care, Sowell notes that many schemes to “bring down the cost of medical care” do so by decreasing quality or increasing the time it takes to get scheduled for important surgery and care. Yet, these schemes often talk as if there is no trade off.
We ought not talk about these things as though we are operating in an unconstrained world, as though having the government step in will magically result in cheaper health care, with the same standard of quality and the same speediness of implementation.
Now, I do think it is possible for health care to get cheaper while preserving excellent quality and timeliness. We have seen this happen, for example, with computers (and technology in general) — costs have gone down, while quality and performance has gone up, and you don’t have to wait in a breadline to get one.
But how did that happen? Through innovation. The cost of health care can come down — while preserving quality and timeliness — through innovation. The question then becomes: what environment is most conducive to motivating the innovation necessary to do this?
It doesn’t come from the government. Notice, again, the tech industry — it is not governmental controls that led to the creative and risk-taking entrepreneurship behind the creation of Apple, Google, and the thousands of other companies (even Microsoft) that have transformed our lives through technological improvements. Rather, it was the opposite — letting them be free to create, pursue, fail, regroup, and make things happen.
I don’t know why it is so hard to learn this lesson. We see it every day, and now the Internet itself is one of the best examples of it — it is through decentralization that society advances, not centralization of government power over an industry.
The greatest irony is that many of the people who get this when it comes to the tech industry, the Internet, and entrepreneurship fail to see the connection when it comes to every other area — such as taxation and, the main issue here, health care.
by Matt Perman
A good post with a letter from Thomas Edison to a young engineer in his company, from the new blog Online MBA.
by Matt Perman
This is from my notes — I think I got these from an article a few years ago: