Engineering Serendipity
Photo WHEN Yahoo banned its employees from working from home in February, the reasons it gave had less to do with productivity than serendipity. “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” explained the accompanying memo. The message was clear: doing your best work solo can’t compete with lingering around the coffee machine waiting for inspiration — in the form of a colleague — to strike. That same day, Google provided details of its new campus in Mountain View, Calif., to Vanity Fair. Silicon Valley is obsessed with serendipity, the reigning buzzword at last month’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival. As Yahoo and Google see it, serendipity is largely a byproduct of social networks. Whereas Mr. ONE reason structural holes persist is our overwhelming preference for face-to-face interactions. And we get a particular intellectual charge from sharing ideas in person. Dr.
What Marissa Mayer Doesn't (and Does) Get About White-Collar Work | Wired Opinion
When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banned her employees from working at home earlier this year, she sparked a culture war over How We Work Today. “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the head of Yahoo HR wrote in a memo. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.” Pundits and executives said Mayer was nuts: Telecommuting offers family-friendly flexibility, and research shows that people who work remotely are far more productive, right? Others shot back in her defense, citing the “water-cooler effect”: You only get innovative, breakthrough ideas when staff work face-to-face and exchange ideas serendipitously. The problem is, both sides are right. When we talk about being “creative,” we usually mean dreaming up bold, weird new ideas. The real challenge for organizations is understanding what type of thinking they want to do, not where to do it. Subsequent work has reproduced his findings. feature photo: Adam Tinworth / Flickr
What Storytellers Can Teach You About How to Learn Faster
Storytelling is a demanding craft. Not only do you have to be able to write or perform the story accurately, you need to create vivid descriptions. Boring, complex or difficult to understand metaphors can turn an imaginative journey into a lifeless plot. You may not think of it deliberately, but learning is very similar to storytelling. Metaphors and Holistic Learning Awhile back I mentioned about how I use holistic learning to get good grades with little studying. Holistic learning is based on the principle that learning works as a whole and not through rote memorization. The storyteller’s art of metaphor is crucial in holistic learning. How to Create Good Metaphors After writing extensively about holistic learning and metaphors previously, I’ve received comments from people asking how they can find metaphors for math, physics, biology, philosophy or some other subject. Storytellers understand that there is no perfect metaphor. Isolate a Characteristic. Taking Metaphors Further
Why Learning and Multitasking Don’t Mix
Living rooms, dens, kitchens, even bedrooms: Investigators followed students into the spaces where homework gets done. Pens poised over their “study observation forms,” the observers watched intently as the students—in middle school, high school, and college, 263 in all—opened their books and turned on their computers. For a quarter of an hour, the investigators from the lab of Larry Rosen, a psychology professor at California State University–Dominguez Hills, marked down once a minute what the students were doing as they studied. A checklist on the form included: reading a book, writing on paper, typing on the computer—and also using email, looking at Facebook, engaging in instant messaging, texting, talking on the phone, watching television, listening to music, surfing the Web. Sitting unobtrusively at the back of the room, the observers counted the number of windows open on the students’ screens and noted whether the students were wearing earbuds. Another study, carried out at St.
