Excerpts

  • Raising the salience of purpose is one of the most potent—and most overlooked—methods of moving others. While we often assume that human beings are motivated mainly by self-interest, a stack of research has shown that all of us also do things for what social scientists call “prosocial” or “self-transcending” reasons.

    That means that not only should we ourselves be serving, but we should also be tapping others’ innate desire to serve. Making it personal works better when we also make it purposeful.

    — To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

  • Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.

    — Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap, and Others Don’t by Jim Collins

  • When the mapping from functional elements to components is one-to-one, each component implements one and only one function. Such components are therefore useful in any other applications where their associated functions occur.

    Components of an artifact exhibiting an integral architecture would potentially be useful only in other artifacts containing the exact combination of functional elements, or parts of functional elements, implemented by the component.

    A modular architecture also enables component interfaces to be identical across several products. Interfaces in modular architectures are decoupled—that is, a particular component will not have to change when surrounding components are changed.

    Therefore, different sets of surrounding components, such as might occur in different applications, do not require different component interfaces. When interfaces are decoupled, an interface standard can be adopted and the same component can be used in a variety of settings.

    — Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich

  • In this world, design is less and less focused on the creation of a single perfect artifact and is increasingly a puzzle requiring creative problem-solving and analytical judgment about product architecture, production process technology, supply chain structure, and market strategy.

    — Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich

  • There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is.

    So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first trying the light one. The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions besides weight.

    — Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

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