Tag: Books
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The Peter Principle – by Nicholas Decker – “Promotions are used as incentives, even if they don’t always match future competence.”
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Some Kind Of Monster (Type) – “The convoluted agreements common to many Fey are an aspect of their adherence to a particular vector of existence. If they agree to something, everyone has to agree that their perspective is the perspective through which the fey are experiencing reality.” // Ponderous! This seems derived from the idea…
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Are better models better? – “Part of the concept of ‘Disruption’ is that important new technologies tend to be bad at the things that matter to the previous generation of technology, but they do something else important instead.”
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– Notable Sections of the 2024 D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide – I’ve been wondering if it’s worth reading the new DM guide. It looks like it.
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Review: Good Strategy, Bad Strategy – Good excerpts and book notes on (corporate) strategy. // “A strategy coordinates action to address a specific challenge.” // Meanwhile, here is the problem with relying too much on war for your case studies: war focusing on killing people to achieve its “business outcomes.”
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Public Domain Day 2025 | Duke University School of Law – “The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.”
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“Here I Gather All the Friends”: Machiavelli and the Emergence of the Private Study – ”Key features of Machiavelli’s personality come out: he can be as vulgar as the villagers; he bickers with them, delighting in puns and innuendos. Minutely attuned to their foibles and peccadillos, nothing is lost on him. He deprecates his now…
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– Review of Seth Godin’s strategy book – “The content is deep. As a long-term strategic planning facilitator, my work confronts issues that most executive teams skim over in their customary short-term, emergency-driven thinking. Getting them to think about abstract questions for long hours at a time, while sitting face to face with their peers…
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– Embracing Antifragility: Building Resilient Products in an Uncertain World – You can read this as a take on what it means to be a “learning organization.” As ever, the hardest, most mysterious, least airport business book-ized topic is “how do we change from ‘traditional’ to this whiz-bang method?”
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Nick Cooke’s Exentrica – ”it seemed as though it were a bridge between Jugendstil and Art Deco — the missing link, so to speak.”
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Deep Dive: Digital WTF book discussion
The Deep Dive crew discuss my book, Digital WTF. This is a collection of columns I wrote for The Register between 2014 to 2018. This one is 32 minutes, which gives a lot of time to see the weird things – strange noises they make, repeated phrases and talking patterns. In the producer notes, I…
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Moonbound Revisited – “Several decades ago, the semiotician A. J. Greimas claimed that all stories are comprised of six actants, in three pairs: Subject/Object; Sender/Receiver; Helper/Opponent.”
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How public intellectuals can extend their shelf lives – Spend a lot of time steering yourself to be optimistic, and engineer a continuous drip of new ideas and perspectives.
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15 hours a week – ‘And yet, for most of that time, I’ve continued to find that exertion harder to exercise than most, while my flair and ability have gained me attention and love, I’ve seen less of whatever today’s equivalent is of “a satisfactory grade in the public examinations”’
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Volo’s Culinary Guide to Icewind Dale – We talk a lot about the downside of the Internet, the web, whatever. But the existence of this as a widely available thing is an example of why the Internet is great. I mean: when would this ever exist otherwise except as some obscure zine on a magazine…
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A Letter from Paul Auster – When the rejection is more comforting than the confirmation.
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Things I Like
There are many things I like, but these are some I can think of now1: Above all else, I like making content and publishing it. I like reading short things (I used to like books, but now that I know a lot of the 101 stuff after ~40 years, I get frustrated/bored by how long…
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Stop Chasing Unicorns – ‘When it comes to ways of working, what do the companies that beat you in deals do better product, design, and engineering-wise?” Silence. “Do they do better discovery and research, ship higher quality work, run more experiments, kill bad decisions faster, retain passionate team members, or have a more effective org…
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Exit, Voice, and Loyalty – “The Exit, Voice and Loyalty model states that members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw…
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