Intuition....................

 

Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.

-Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

as cut-and-pasted from here

Essence..................

The essence of Franklin is that he was a civic-minded man.  He cared more about public behavior than inner piety, and he was more interested in building the City of Man than the City of God.  The maxim her proclaimed on his first trip back from London—"Man is a sociable being"—was reflected not only in his personal collegiality, but also in his belief that benevolence was the binding virtue of society.  As Poor Richard put it, "He that drinks his cider alone, let his catch his horse alone."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

grave, wise, and faithful men...........

 

     Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison.  They were what Pelatiah Webster observed was so necessary for the new country: "grave, wise and faithful men."  Madison provided the architecture for the republic, Hamilton its masonry, and Jefferson its soul and poetry.  And now, in the heady days of 1789 and 1790, with Washington as president and the three working together—none of them believed in political parties, which they feared would lead to "rage," "dissolution," and eventual "ruin" of the republic—it seemed that anything and everything was possible.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

Living better than the Royalty of old..........

 The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.

-from this Charles C. Mann essay

brainwriting....................

      To unearth the hidden potential in teams, instead of brainstorming, we're better off shifting to a process called brainwriting.  The initial steps are solo.  You start by asking everyone to generate ideas separately.  Next, you pool them and share them anonymously among the group.  To preserve independent judgment, each member evaluates them on their own.  Only then does the team come together to select and refine the most promising options.  By developing and assessing ideas individually before choosing and elaborating them, teams can surface and advance possibilities that might not get attention otherwise. . . .

     Collective intelligence begins with individual creativity.  But it doesn't end there.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Opening paragraphs........................

       Whether the photographer, who would forever remain anonymous, felt the conceivably immense pressure we will never know.  But with the head of the nation and the soul of the nation's preservation movement, both rugged, demanding, and outspoken men, paired together for a brief time, posted against arguably the nation's most transcendent and iconic landscape, a long journey by train, horseback, and boot from any major city, the stakes in making a good image were high.

-Dean King, Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship That Saved Yosemite

The more things change...................

      One of the things which surprised me was how thin most of the newspaper and magazine reporting of the period was, the degree to which journalists accepted the norms of the government and, particularly in the glamorous Kennedy era, the reputation of these new stars at face value.  Credit was given more readily for educational prowess and for academic achievement than for accomplishment in government.

-David Halberstam, The Best and The Brightest 

Your share......................

 To maintain good relationships with your colleagues means, among other things, to give credit where credit is due; to take your share of the jobs no one wants but still must be done; to deliver on time and in a high-quality manner when teamed with other people; to show up when expected; and, in general, to be trusted to do somewhat more than your job formally requires.

-Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order:  12 More Rules For Life

an inner sense of captaincy..................

 Developing an inner sense of captaincy is not about compensating for an incompetent leader—nor does it mean thinking we always know best. The better someone is at leading people, the more they create the conditions for their team to take initiative and be proactive about preventing problems. They show by example that they inhabit a state rather than a particular role. A stronger leader can mean a more independent team.

-from this Farnam Street post

Creativity as a team sport...........................

 Yes, the actual act of making the work is sometimes a solo activity (drawing, writing, editing a film, etc) but the real driving force behind every creative pro is their community: their clients, collaborators, peers and the rest of the humans in the complex web of symbiotic relationships that give us inspiration, support and (ultimately) an income. Creativity cannot live in a vacuum. We depend on each other, like the members of any other ecosystem.

-Chase Jarvis, as cut-and-pasted from here

Contrasting outlooks...........................

      The difference between Hopper's version of history and IBM's ran deeper than a dispute over who should get the most credit.  It showed fundamentally contrasting outlooks on the history of innovation.  Some studies of technology and science emphasize, as Hopper did, the role of creative inventors who make innovative leaps.  Other studies emphasize the role of teams and institutions, such as the collaborative work done at Bell Labs and IBM's Endicott facility.  This latter approach tries to show that what may seem like creative leaps—the Eureka moment— are actually the result of an evolutionary process that occurs when ideas, concepts, technologies, and engineering methods ripen together.  Neither was of looking at technological advancement is, on its own, completely satisfying.  Most of the great innovations of the digital age sprang from an interplay of creative individuals (Mauchly, Turing, von Neumann, Aiken) with teams that knew how to implement their ideas.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Historically misunderstood..............

     By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation.  But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius.  His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative:  assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.  "I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me,"  Edison famously said.  "I am quite correctly described as "more of a sponge than an inventor."

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Bridgewater's...........................

..............................................self-reinforcing evolutionary spiral:

1.   We went from on independent thinker who wanted to achieve audacious goals to a group of independent thinkers who wanted to achieve audacious goals.

2.   To enable these independent thinkers to have effective collective decision making, we created an idea meritocracy based on principles that ensured we would be radically honest and transparent with each other, have thoughtful disagreements, and have idea-meritocratic ways of getting past our disagreements to make decisions.

3.   We recorded these decision-making principles on paper and later encoded them into computers and made our decisions based on them.

4.   This produced our successes and failures, which produced more learnings, which were written into more principles that were systemized and acted upon.

5.   This process resulted in excellent work and excellent relationships that led us to having well-rewarded and happy employees and clients.

6.   That led us to be able to bring n more audacious independent thinkers with more audacious goals to strengthen this self-reinforcing upward spiral.

     We did that over and over again, which produced the evolutionary looping behind Bridgewater's forty-plus years of success.

-Ray Dalio, Principles:  Life and Work

Problem solved........................

The best laid plans..............So, we are closing in on finishing the Old School project - with the exception of the old boiler room.   The old boiler room, affectionately called "the dungeon" by My Sweetie, is an 1,800 square foot multi-level space at the rear of the building.   While it is more than just a basement, it passes for the basement.  Not all, but much of it is well below street grade.  For a number of reasons, its redevelopment into a two-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom apartment has trailed the rest of the project. Given its general separation, including its private entrance, from the balance of the 30,000 square foot building, we can get occupancy permits for the other 28 units before this last unit is completed.  And we have proceeded accordingly.
      Anyway, last Thursday the plumbers approached me with a look on their faces that typically means "we have a problem."  Said problem was that "there is NO WAY we can get the 5' one-piece fiberglass shower unit into the master bathroom of the basement apartment."   The two doorways they have to navigate to get the the master bathroom are too small for the shower unit to pass through.   As this is the second time they have tried - the first unit turned out to have a crack in it.  No word on whether the crack was pre-existing or occurred in the attempt to jam the shower unit through a too-small opening.   While I like people who offer solutions when they bring you problems, the solutions they proposed didn't pass muster.  The first idea was using a four-piece shower unit instead of a one-piece (not acceptable to me).  The second idea was building the shower out of ceramic tile (too expensive).  Hmmm.   What to do, what to do?
        To provide a window for the master bedroom of this apartment, we had to cut out an old make-up air vent and replace it with a double window.  The recently installed window had not yet been caulked in.  A quick call was made to the the glass company asking that they come finalize the job and caulk this window, with the suggestion that before they do that, they first take the window all the way out first and then re-install it.   What?  Once the situation was explained, they had a crew on site within two hours.    The whole process went something like this:

A short section of the newly installed wrought iron fencing
had to be removed to provide access to the window

window carefully removed

Window set to the side

why carry when lifts are around?

This better fit

Of course it does

Final resting place for the shower

window back in place

The whole process, from problem presented to problem solved, took four hours and cost about $400.  If only all problems were as amenable to solution.

This almost makes me feel better..........

via

Alliances, science.....................

.............and maybe more than you want to know about lichens.

via

You can't tell the players......................

.....................................................without a program.  More than everything you wanted to know about the war(s) in Syria - here.

Interaction...............................

The gestation of  Toy Story 2 offers a number of lessons that were vital to Pixar's evolution.  Remember that the spine of the story - Woody's dilemma, to stay or to go - was the same before and after the Braintrust worked it over.  One version didn't work at all, and the other was deeply affecting.  Why?  Talented storytellers had found a way to make viewers care, and the evolution of this story line made it abundantly clear to me:  If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up.  If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.
      The takeaway here is worth repeating:  Getting the team right is the necessary precursor to getting the ideas right.  It is easy to say you want talented people, and you do, but the way those people interact with one another is the real key.  Even the smartest people can form an ineffective team if they are mismatched.  That means it is better to focus on how the team is performing, not on the talents of the individuals within it.  A good team is make up of people who complement each other.  There is an important principle here that may seem obvious, yet - in my experience - is not obvious at all.  Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the idea right.

-Ed Catmull,  Creativity, Inc.:  Overcoming The Unseen Forces That Stand In The Way Of True Inspiration

Bill Russell..............................

Sports Illustrated, celebrating their 60th year, is re-running 60 great columns.  In 1999, Frank Deford, who I have always thought of as a really good writer, featured Bill Russell, who may be the greatest winning athlete, as well as the best teammate, ever.  The essay is worth your time.  A wee excerpt:

What do you remember your father telling you, Bill?

"Accept responsibility for your actions.... Honor thy father and mother.... If they give you $10 for a day's work, you give them $12 worth in return."

Even more clearly, Russell recalls the gritty creed his mother gave him when he was a little boy growing up in segregation and the Depression in West Monroe, La. Katie said, "William, you are going to meet people who just don't like you. On sight. And there's nothing you can do about it, so don't worry. Just be yourself. You're no better than anyone else, but no one's better than you."

On spirituality......................

     "But the game itself is spiritual.  I mean, you're not going for a two-minute run.  There has to be a connection and a trust with the teammates.  Which I think is where the spirituality is."
-Bobby Greacen, as excerpted from here