Posts Tagged 'history'

A Timeless Management Lesson for Innovative Technology Startups

Posted on November 12th, 2012 · Posted in Startups

I want to share with you part of a letter written to a technological innovator who wanted to bring his invention to market: Firstly: I want to know whether if I continue to work on and about your own great subject, you will undertake to abide wholly by the judgment of myself … on all practical matters relating to whatever can involve relations with any … fellow-creatures? Secondly: can you undertake to give your mind wholly and undividedly … to the consideration of all those matters in which I shall at times require your intellectual assistance and supervision; and can.. Read more

Alan Turing’s Earthshaking Philosophical Insight

Posted on October 12th, 2012 · Posted in Off-topic

Being the curator of the Alan Turing Year exhibition at the Jerusalem Science Museum, I was invited to sit on a panel dedicated to Turing’s legacy at the ICON Science Fiction, Imagination and The Future festival in Tel Aviv. My talk there was well received, and touches on some interesting truths, so I decided to share its content here. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have! Incidentally, Alan Turing’s life and work will be the basis of a new lecture I will be adding to my public speaking offerings. The subject is a fascinating one on so.. Read more

An early observation on multitasking

Posted on May 25th, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

While browsing a forgotten bookshelf I found myself leafing through an old volume called “The scientist in action – a scientific study of his methods”, by one William H. George, a Physics professor from Sheffield. This book had been published in 1938 by Emerson Books, NY. And as I flipped the pages I happened to notice the following statement: It is one of the properties of man that if he tries to give attention to many things at once he becomes confused. Confusion of thought is a hindrance to scientific research… I have no idea who Mr. George was, but.. Read more

Is email going away?

Posted on April 23rd, 2012 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

Every now and then someone proclaims that email has outlived its usefulness (some, groaning under their Inboxes, might say outstayed its welcome), and is on the way out. How about it? It might seem that these pronouncements of doom for the world’s most widely used messaging channel have some basis. After all, the young generation – Generation Y – really prefer to conduct much of their communication via Facebook; it is said that some universities don’t bother to assign email accounts to their students because they don’t need them anymore. And even in the enterprise, we have that startling declaration.. Read more

What would Socrates think of Google?

Posted on December 8th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was discussing with a college student I’ve been advising whether it was a good or a bad thing that Google makes access to answers so easy. To my surprise, she opined that it’s a bad thing – because people who use Google to answer a question are more likely to forget the answer they find, whereas if they have to think the problem through and discover the answer for themselves they will remember it in the long term. An interesting insight from a Gen Y. But what struck me as remarkable was the fact that this is not a.. Read more

Bye bye, E!

Posted on October 12th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

The letter “e” has become a central symbol of the internet age, along with the once obscure “@” glyph. We have it prefixed to all sorts of old words, from Commerce to Bay, from Business to Book… and of course, to Mail, giving us what remains possibly the most  useful online tool yet devised: email. But things change, and the venerable “e” is beginning to slip. I notice that more and more young people drop the “e” and just say “mail”  without even realizing the ambiguity this introduces – their generation’s experience with paper-in-envelope mail is so scanty that they.. Read more

The innocence of youth

Posted on September 4th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was having coffee with a colleague I go back a long way with, and he told me of his first encounter with email. He had just joined Intel (in Israel) in 1988, and his boss showed him his new cubicle, his desk, and his computer, on which he demonstrated the email application. My friend came from a workplace where there was no such thing, and the following conversation ensued, more or less: My friend: What is this for? His boss: well, if you want to write something to someone, you write it in this window, add the person’s name.. Read more

How to keep distribution lists short

Posted on July 20th, 2011 · Posted in Analysis and Opinion

I was lecturing about Information Overload at an MBA course in Haifa University, and a student shared a lovely story. Long ago, she said, before email replaced paper correspondence, she used to work at a company where memos were written on special forms that came as a three-layer stack with chemical copying. You’d write or type the top layer and two copies were created on the layers below. This was very convenient (you didn’t need to mess with Carbon Paper) but had one side effect: you could only create up to three copies at once. If you needed more, you’d.. Read more

The iPad is mightier than the pen

Posted on June 7th, 2011 · Posted in Off-topic

It has been remarked that younger people tend not to wear watches, because their ubiquitous cellphones and other computing devices make them superfluous (interestingly, this brings back the action of having to fish something out of your pocket to read the time –  a throwback to the Victorian pocket watch, without the chain!). But I’ve just been informed of another victim to portable computing, and it goes back much earlier than the watch. I was talking to a friend who is also a consultant and he told me that in his workshops the attendees often sit with iPads and other.. Read more

A sad vignette of family life in the email era

Posted on May 5th, 2011 · Posted in Impact and Symptoms

An Information Overload sighting at a technology conference I enjoyed today: One speaker, a senior manager in a hi-tech multinational, made use of the TV series “House” to illustrate a point. Then he confessed: I don’t watch House. My wife does watch it, and I do mail at the same time. A lovely domestic  tableau, that: husband and wife sitting serenely in the living room, close in space but totally apart in spirit, thanks to the 24×7 demands of email overload. By contrast, I recall the early years of Television in the sixties, when our entire family would flock once.. Read more