Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) are all the rage these days. People are paying millions for NFTs that exist mainly as bits and pieces of computer code. At times like these, it’s useful to keep Gartner Group’s Hype Cycle in mind. A new idea is being hyped. Is it all smoke? Or is there some fire beneath it?Without being overly technical, let’s look at the attributes of any item (token/document/image/currency, etc.) stored in a blockchain. ...
I like to think of Blaise Pascal (1623 — 1662), the French mathematician, as the western world’s first practitioner of Twitter. His collected Pensées were brief, enigmatic thoughts about mathematics, religion, and philosophy. Collected after his death, they read like tweets from the 17th century (though they were intended to be a much more comprehensive defense of religion).In the Pensées, Pascal made his famous wager. We all bet with our lives on whether God ...
I recently saw an ad for Progressive Insurance that says, "Drivers who save with Progressive, save $796 on average."Now I like Progressive. And I love Flo. So, I'm sure that the statement is true. I'm sure it's based on fact.But it also entails a logical fallacy. If you don't spot the fallacy, you may easily assume that the average savings for all drivers who switch to Progressive is $796. That would be a ...
Want your kids to have a better life than you do? Move to a more walkable neighborhood.That’s the upshot of a study recently published in American Psychologist. The authors, Shigehiro Oishi, Minkyung Koo, and Nicholas Buttrick, correlated neighborhood walkability with intergenerational upward social mobility. The basic finding: kids who grow up in walkable neighborhoods are more likely to move upward – as compared to their parents – than kids who don’t live in ...
All humans want to connect the dots. We want to explain why something happened – or will happen -- by linking events through time. A caused B caused C and that will cause D. When we do this in the past, we call it history. When we project it into the future, we call it politics.We want to connect the dots because we deeply desire a sense of control. If we can explain ...
Let’s say we have an election and 20 precincts report theirresults. Here’s the total number of votes cast in each precinct:3271 2987 2769 33892587 3266 4022 42313779 3378 4388 53272964 2864 2676 36533453 4156 3668 4218Why would you suspect fraud?Before you answer that, let me ask you another question.Would you please write down a random number between one and 20?Asking you to write down a random number seems like an innocent ...
The content on this website is divided into four areas: Strategy, Innovation, Brand, and Critical Thinking
Strategy — materials in this section focus on the definition of strategy, how to plan your strategy and achieve a consensus around it, and how to execute on your strategy.
Innovation — what is innovation and how does it differ from invention? How can you stimulate sustaining innovation? How can you spot a disruptive innovation and defend against it before it kills your business?
Brand — brand is in the eye of the beholder. You’ll need to communicate simple, consistent messages make the image crystal clear. You’ll also need to be persuasive. The materials in this section teach you all about it.
Critical Thinking – before you can improve your strategy and brand or stimulate innovation, you often need to improve your thinking. The materials in this section help you think about your thinking so you can improve it.