Letters Remain

Category: business

  • Influencing Behaviour Online

    Ignoring, for a moment, the rather unsound and outmoded neuroscience propounded in the introduction, these tips for extending influence online and persuading your visitors are worth a few minutes: Show ratings and reviews by other users (for action through social validation). Provide instant gratification and a quick fix. Put the most important action to be…

  • Anti-Patterns

    I’ve written about design patterns a couple of times in the past, but today I discovered anti-patterns: design patterns that “may be commonly used but [are] ineffective and/or counterproductive in practice”. One of the “key elements present to formally distinguish an actual anti-pattern from a simple bad habit, bad practice, or bad idea”: Some repeated…

  • On Meetings

    Contemplating how to lead without meetings , The Washington Post asks three equally qualified people for their views on them. Daisy Wademan Dowling, executive director of leadership development at an unnamed Fortune 500 company, responded with the following: The real reason leaders end up in too many meetings? Because it’s flattering: having your presence “required”…

  • Overcoming Network Effects

    A network effect is “the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other people”. When there is a positive network effect we say that the good or service in question increases in usefulness the more users there are, like the telephone or online social networks. Of course, being in…

  • Cory Doctorow’s Experiment: Does Free Work?

    For his next collection of short stories to be published, titled With a Little Help, author and blogger-extraordinaire Cory Doctorow will be running an experiment so that he can see whether his strategy of offering his work for free is working. With prices to range from $0.00 to $10,000 for various packages, Doctorow is to track his…

  • Innovation of Innovation

    The costs of innovation have exceeded the benefits, says Umair Haque, and it’s time to move away from this “relic of the industrial era” towards something specifically “built for the 21st century”. Haque has dubbed this the almost too hip Awesomeness Manifesto. The three problems with innovation as it stands, according to Haque: Innovation relies on…

  • Online Dating and OkCupid

    OkCupid, one of the biggest online dating websites around, has had a bit of an up and down history. Originally called SparkMatch, itself a by-product of the once popular TheSpark, the site was one of the first completely free dating websites that now abound online. Inc. Magazine looks at the history of OkCupid—it’s struggles and…

  • The Seven Wastes

    One of the principal goals of the Toyota Production System (TPS) is to identify steps that add value (and those which do not) and then design out waste. Muda is one of the three types of waste (the other two being muri and mura) and the one that has been given the most attention since the TPS…

  • Scheduling and Non-Hierarchical Management

    These two essays have been doing the rounds of late, and for good reason: Paul Graham’s comparison between the schedules of Managers and the schedules of Makers (creatives). The gist? A manager’s day is divided into hour-long blocks of time, makers work in much longer, relatively unconstrained and non-discrete units of time. The problem is…

  • On Good and Bad Managers

    Charisma, confidence and being vocal are key to being perceived as a leader, Time suggests after summarising some research on what makes people persuasive leaders. Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas,…