Beliefs

• Placebos work.
• Hawthorne effect.
• Halo effect.
• There need be no commodities.
• Reality is relative: we each have our own.

Mental expectations set real limits.

• Learned helplessness.
• "They are able because they think they are able." Virgil
• Optimism works better than pessimism.
• Logic = blinders to intuitive exploration.

Modern people have cro magnon brains.

• The human brain is the product of 10 million years of evolution, 99.8% of it in caves, on the savennah, hunting and gathering.
• Our relatively modern "thinking" brains are in perpetual contact and conflict with our ancient "feeling" brains.
• Pre-agricultural troglodytes lived entirely in the now. Our brains didn't need to plan very far ahead, so looking longterm is not in our natural repertoire.
• Our brains seek patterns, often finding one when it's not intentionally there. As we retell a dream, our brains invent the context to make sense of nonsense. We do this in waking life as well, but are not conscious of it.

People are warm-blooded, omnivorous, sight-mammals.

• We are creatures.
• Circadian rhythms control our thinking.
• If it full empty it; if it's empty, fill it.
• Fight or flight response is the root of stress in the office as well as the jungle.

People like what they know; they don't know what they like.

• In marketing, position services for maximum halo effect.
• First we make our habits, then our habits make us.
• Personal comfort zone = blinders, rut.
• Change threatens stability.

Be alert. Keep an open mind. Follow your heart.

• Mindfulness matters.
• Be here now.
• Walk in other people's shoes.
• Get out of your comfort zone.
• Learning is an active process.

To every thing there is a cycle.

• You're born, you live, you die.
• You live on through your children, your start-ups.
• Epigensis = born at the right time.

THINGS

Everything flows.

• Time flies.
• Nothing alive is ever finished.
• Worthwhile documents, policies, reports, and relationships live.

All things are connected.

• Connections often as important as the things they connect.
• Value of a network increases exponentially to the number of nodes.

Less is more.

• Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication
• When confronted with two explanations, choose the simplest.

Everything exists on numerous levels.

• Level of abstraction/detail. Meta-.
• No matter what's happening in the plaza, you can always go up to the balcony for a look at the bigger picture.
• Laterality, everything/idea has neighbors, related by concept, co-location, timing, etc.
• Everything is rooted in a life cycle. It's young or old, evolving or dying.

Process is power.

• Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.  --Chinese Proverb
• One person's process is another person's content.

Virtually everything is on a continuum. It's shades of gray rather than black or white.

• There is no absolute truth. There is no meaning without context.

Most things in life are beyond our control. (See Serendipity)

• Better to think things through than to thrash and force-fit.
• The mind and body are one.

In diversity is strength.

• Diversification decreases risk.
• We are smarter than any one of us.

Shit happens.

• Entropy.
• Moorphy's Law (On Internet time, shit happens exponentially.)
• Chaos.

ECONOMICS

Decisions are a tradeoff of risk & reward.

• Leverage = How much risk or reward.
• R & R are not logical.
• ...rather, a mix of logic, emotion, biological drives, habit, associations, current state of mind, etc.
• Information is valuable only to the extent that it will change decisions.

Does it matter?

• What's in it for me?
• What business are we in?
• Principle of materiality.
• Don't fret over the inconsequential.
• Don't sweat the small stuff.
• The past is a sunk cost.

Invest time and resources wisely.

• Time is the scarce resource.
• Optimize mix of up-front preparation and auctual doing and folllow-up.
• Do not confuse thought with action.
• There is no such thing as a free lunch.
• Beware of armchair data.
• Diversify
• Leverage

When management treats time, space and no-matter as resources rather than as roadblocks, our methods of organization will no longer be lagging behind, at the end.  --Future Perfect

TECHNIQUE

In business, take Jack Welch's advice...

• focus on customers
• resist bureaucracy
• think imaginatively
• invigorate others.

How to behave

• Live as if this is all there is.
• Look for the best in others. Other esteem.
• Share my thoughts and feelings. Be authentic.
• Open the door to feedback.
• Smile. Learn. Laugh. Pay attention.
• Practice optmism. Be here now.
• Live with intention.
• Think out of the box.
• Do what I love. Do it with gusto.
• Maintain balance.
• Don't obsess.

Seek patterns

• Homeostasis -- central tendency, self-correction, standard deviation.
• Pareto's law: 20% of the resources yield 80% of the results.
• Self-organization
• Organize by product or area or function

I don't ask him ”What's the problem?" I say, "Tell me the story." That way, I find out what the problem really is. --Avram Goldberg

Structure follows strategy.  (Strategy = plans and policies by which a company aims to gain advantages over its competitors.)

Drivel, BS, and caution signs

Time problems.

• Anachronism. Fighting the last war.
• "And so he continues to plan his future with the rules of the present in mind -- heedless of the possibility that the future will have rules of its own.  Change in inherent in civilization." --Harry Brown
• Finding comfort in obsolete, vestigial rules and concepts. Accounting is BS.
• Short-term fix for long-term problem
• Too busy chopping down trees to sharpen his ax

Accepting the wrong answer to the right problem.

• Illogical expediency
• Group think
• The madness of crowds

Evaluating with what's easy to measure rather than what's appropriate.

• examples: $/hour, academic grades, IQ
• need to measure what counts
• Nasrudin story
• confusion of means & ends

Information is not instruction.

• Telling is not teaching.

Using my context to understand your situation.

• Jimmy Swaggart syndrome
• Jungian projections

Confusing meaningless social noise with a message.

• "It's a communicating problem."
• "We don't have time."
• "How 'bout them Niners?"
• "Thanks a lot."

A word is not the thing itself.

MODELS

Plan for this section is to grow a set of common processes and graphs.

• Decision making objects
• Presentation objects & explanations

(It would be cool to create fill-in-the-blank templates.)