In order to solve complex problems we must join forces, coöperate and collaborate! Let’s Try More Interdisciplinarity!
June 26, 2015
A Blind Man Should Not Judge Colors
In countries with a high affinity for soccer, there usually live as many soccer coaches as there are male inhabitants above 6 years. They watch the game and feel inclined as well as empowered not only to criticise but to come up with smashing proposals for enhancement. We find the same behavior in other areas, such as business: imagine you work in the marketing department and you’ve just come up with some
April 26, 2015
Finishability
“Finishability” is a qualitative term that describes the ease of being able to screed and finish concrete. But you could also use it in other contexts, such as in communication. If you’re equipped with a certain finishability, people will listen to you, understand you and coöperate with you. Think of finishability as an antidote to information overload, as the Economist’s Tom Standage suggests. One of the integral features of the Internet are links
April 3, 2015
Dropping Expectations
We tend to start any interaction with our fellow co-humans based on certain expectations. This is true especially for long-term private relationships as well as for business environments. What would happen if we dropped our expectations and interacted without any Interpretation of our counterpart’s reactions? Starting from my personal experiences, I suggest to skip any specific expectation regarding the reaction of your conversational partner for a week or so, be it in
March 30, 2015
Does behavioral data facilitate the next quantum leap in human evolution?
What makes Homo Sapiens superior to other animals? We are weaker and slower, but our brains are 3–5 times bigger than those of our nearest species, the Orang Utans. Are the achievements of building the atomic bomb or inventing the internet the main differentiators? Of course not — what makes Homo Sapiens superior is his ability to communicate and to be social — his cultural foundation. About 300,000 years ago,
March 9, 2015
Data Consciousness — Managing Your Life Line
I am convinced that in the next few years, we will run every aspect of our lives in a fundamentally different way than we have done before. We’re going to do that because .… it’s possible. We will manage every aspect of our lives based on our own data which we will be aware of for the first time in history. In order to maximize our convenience in dealing with our
February 25, 2015
If You Understand, You Don’t
Often, I hear people say to one another: “Yes, I understand.” This phrase can be heard in private as well as in business conversations and every time I ask myself if people reflect about what they just said. From a neurological perspective, to understand something means to match that with what is already known by a human being. If you tell me that something has happened because the earth moves around the sun, I’ll accept that
February 21, 2015
The unpleasant discusssion
Today, I had a quite strange and unpleasant discussion. It was about business strategy and sales, and the both of us differed quite clearly in our views on how to ‘do it right’. I wasn’t in the best mood, and from my perspective, the other guy behaved in an egoistic, slightly arrogant and selfish manner. He used typical killer terms, such as “totally clear” or “as I’ve always been saying” to underline his
February 17, 2015
The Person You Don’t Like
There is this person you don’t like. You don’t really know her but she behaves in a way which reminds you of your Latin teacher, she’s this tall, over-dressed, SUV-armed hectic housewife type of a woman and although you cross her paths quite often she does not even to have taken notice of you. We all have at least one or a few individuals we not only ignore but we actively dislike — because
January 23, 2015
From New Year’s Resolutions To New Day’s Resolutions
When it comes to New Year’s Resolutions, there generally are two fractions: most of us make their resolutions on December, 31, and stick to them at least for a few days or weeks. Others deny any positive aspects of these resolutions since people don’t stick to them, anyway. There are numerous scientific approaches of setting goals — even data-driven ones — and some of them even suggest that making resolutions could
December 31, 2014
Clean up your shit
I’ve just started reading „The Hard Thing About Hard Things“, a book about personal experiences building startups by Ben Horowitz, well-known to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists as a partner of Marc Andressen at a16z. It’s the best business-related book I’ve read for a long time. Although on a different level, I have experienced pretty much the same as Ben has: the ups and — even more often and more distinct — the downs of running
September 16, 2014
Think Small, Achieve Big
Getting-things-done tools, or goal-setting by breaking big goals into smaller, more achievable ones, have been very fashionable in the management field lately. A different perspective, but the same aspect of becoming more productive, is the “Lean” approach, as in Lean Management or Lean Startup. All those approaches are based on one fundamental principle: think small. The flip side of all goal setting techniques is the limited size of the belief someone has
August 31, 2014