Thursday, August 18, 2011

Sublime Collaboration

An innovative and beautiful demonstration of international collaboration.










In a moving and madly viral video last year, composer Eric Whitacre led a virtual choir of singers from around the world. He talks through the creative challenges of making music powered by YouTube, and unveils the first 2 minutes of his new work, "Sleep," with a video choir of 2,052.

Lux Arumque

Sleep

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The Importance of Mistakes in Complex Systems

Tim Harford argues for making intelligent mistakes in order to understand and imrove compex systems.









Economics writer Tim Harford studies complex systems -- and finds a surprising link among the successful ones: they were built through trial and error. In this sparkling talk from TEDGlobal 2011, he asks us to embrace our randomness and start making better mistakes.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Scaling in Biological, Business and Social Systems

There are some extremely powerful and useful concepts only introduced here. This requires more study to really absorb. As I understand it one of the implications of this work is that innovation is key to the survival of cities, but doesn't help much for companies.









Physicist Geoffrey West has found that simple, mathematical laws govern the properties of cities -- that wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other aspects of a city can be deduced from a single number: the city's population. In this mind-bending talk from TEDGlobal he shows how it works and how similar laws hold for organisms and corporations.

Language as the Root of Cooperation and Intellectual Property



Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Complexity vs. Randomness

History as the battle between complexity and randomness. Insightful!



Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

Big History

Friday, August 5, 2011

Delivering Happiness

This appears to be customer delight redux from our book in 1994: Innovate: Straight Path to Quality, Customer Delight and Competitive Advantage. To read about our model read:

Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers...Not!