"So rather than focusing on emulating particular techniques and methods, we should be doing everything we can to embrace, inspire, and use our own empathy in order to better understand and relate to our students. It is only from this space that we can effectively generate and use the appropriate techniques and methods for any particular task. In this way, there is no “recipe,” “secret sauce,” or “silver bullet” for teaching effectively that can be used by anybody, anytime, anywhere. Instead, I’m proposing a “generative” method, one in which we “generate” the appropriate method that takes into consideration the broadest range of factors that we can manage to accommodate."

"…Cities are superlinear; corporations are sublinear…as they [cities] grow bigger, get more productive, creative, energy-efficient, & generally better by just about every interesting metric. Corporations…get less productive, less creative, more wasteful, & generally worse in every way.

Makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? Creative, energetic young people want to live in big cities, but want to work in small companies.

On the macro-scale, this means cities are effectively immortal, while corporations (like humans) are mortal… [and] their lifespan has been falling rapidly…

My theory is straightforward: Cities are open; corporations are closed. People can move into and out of cities freely and basically do whatever they want so long as they can pay the cost of living. So people naturally leave cities that don't work for them and flood into cities that do. This makes cities self-renewing and self-organizing."

"Informality is the condition of an unplanned system and arises spontaneously. While informal systems can be inefficient, they also provide a range of emergent and positive services.

Groupshot designs new processes and tools that engage the positive qualities of informality. The result is an enhancement of the capabilities of informal systems, and the optimal connection between the best of the informal and the benefits of the formal."

"We’ve treated ’scale’ like an unalloyed good for so long that it seems peculiar to question it. There are plenty of reasons for wanting to scale businesses and services up to make more things for more people in more areas; perhaps the strongest is that things usually get cheaper and quicker to provide.

The problem is that scale has a cost, and that’s being unable to respond to the wants and needs of unique individuals. Theoretically, that’s not a problem in a free market, but of course, we don’t have a free market, and we certainly don’t have a free market when it comes to politics and media."

Really too much to quote from this Jon Kolko piece, but here's the conclusion:

"We were broadly untrained in making sense of things, in creating an understanding of how systems work, and we ignored consequences that were diffused, but present. We critiqued the aesthetic of our designs but did not dare to judge our subject matter and content, as we had no spirituality of technology upon which to compare. And so our "progress" has been, as Steve Baty describes, "cold, relentless, asocial, and unapologetic." We are now, collectively, wiser, and in that regard, perhaps the glory day of design—as an integrated discipline of humanizing technology—is finally upon us."

Too much to quote, both in the post and in the comments. Update: Already bookmarked this back in February with a different URL, but leaving this here because it's so good.

"Maeda acknowledges that he now understands social media can only take you so far in redesigning leadership. All those great hopes for leading by blogging, tweeting, & emailing proved inadequate to gritty business of persuading an actual living, breathing constituency to follow his direction…<br />
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Maeda has scaled back his blogging. He accepts that big Samsung screens he installed as a way to bring students together digitally, by allowing them to post new work, notices of events, & messages, never caught on. "Technologists believe that if they impose a solution, people will adopt it," he says. "But buy-in can't be bought."<br />
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Instead, he says, he's going about leading in old-fashioned way: building relationships one at a time, having coffee w/ faculty, jogging w/ students late at night, offering free pizza as an inducement to get them to show up & talk. These interactions are time-consuming, high-bandwidth, interactive, fiscally expensive for a busy president, & unscalable."

Via: http://twitter.com/willrich45/status/25582114153963520

"People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year."<br />
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"Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity."<br />
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"If you follow process religiously, you’ll never get anything done!"<br />
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"Hire well: This goes without saying, and I didn’t mention it in the panel. It’s a big topic probably best left for another post. Hiring great people makes everything else below easier.<br />
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Communication: Everyone in the company uses IRC, not just engineers. Everyone, all the time, from the CEO on down. Sure, sometimes you can miss things if you’re not in IRC at the time, but the benefits far outweigh the costs, and you have a lot fewer meetings about day-to-day mundane issues. … <br />
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Encourage experimentation … External transparency … Embracing failure …"

"I’m always searching for the right way to explain why traditional notions about transforming schools are misguided, and I think my friend Dan nailed it."

"Twenty-first Century scale is about ambition, not stuff. So here's a killer question to kick off 2010: Does your ambition scale?

"We've been killing conversations about software with "That won't scale" for so long we've forgotten that scaling problems aren't inherently fatal. The N-squared problem is only a problem if N is large, and in social situations, N is usually not large. A reading group works better with 5 members than 15; a seminar works better with 15 than 25, much less 50, and so on. This in turn gives software form-fit to a particular group a number of desirable characteristics -- it's cheaper and faster to build, has fewer issues of scalability, and likelier uptake by its target users. It also has several obvious downsides, including less likelihood of use outside its original environment, greater brittleness if it is later called on to handle larger groups, and a potentially shorter lifespan."

"number of factors why email is failing for me while IM & Twitter are scaling...2 specific reasons in combination account for most of problem: Point to point communications do not scale; Emails tend to be bloated with too many details and different topics

"1. innovation happens as a result of bringing together knowledge, IQ and point of view 2. Don’t worry about whether something is right or wrong, just try to find out what is going on 3. How come there isn’t a Moore’s Law for software?"