Resources for product teams from industry experts
Whether professionals have a chance to develop intuitive expertise depends essentially on the quality and speed of feedback, as well as on sufficient opportunity to practice. Expertise is not a single skill; it is a collection of skills, and the same professional may be highly expert in some of the tasks in her domain while remaining a novice in others.
— Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1 — and we often do not know the source of these impressions. How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease — including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose — and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source.
— Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. The operations of associative memory contribute to a general confirmation bias “…”
A deliberate search for confirming evidence, known as positive test strategy, is also how System 2 tests a hypothesis. Contrary to the rules of philosophers of science, who advise testing hypotheses by trying to refute them, people (and scientists, quite often) seek data that are likely to be compatible with the beliefs they currently hold.
— Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
The manager role is the “catalyst” role. As with all catalysts, the manager’s function is to speed up the reaction between two substances, thus creating the desired end product. Specifically, the manager creates performance in each employee by speeding up the reaction between the employee’s talents and the company’s goals and between the employee’s talents and the customers’ needs.
When hundreds of managers play this role well, the company becomes strong, one employee at a time. No doubt, in today’s slimmed-down business world, most of these managers also shoulder other responsibilities. They are expected to be subject-matter experts, individual superstars and sometimes leaders in their own right. These are important roles, which great managers execute with varying styles and degrees of success. But when it comes to the manager aspect of their responsibilities, great managers all excel at this catalyst role.
— First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently by Gallup Press
Our project in the years to come will be to advance a positive vision of what liberal democracy can deliver with the new tools that technology is placing at our disposal. Its pillars must be:
We must be guided by real research into which solutions are likely to work for society’s greater good. We must harness all of the tools of human culture and creativity to this vision: the arts, rhetoric, leadership, and education. And, of course, we must embrace change and disruption. We should understand technological development as a constant source of renewal and enlarged possibilities.
We must plant the seeds of this new vision now. “…” entrepreneurship can be part of this solution by:
The good news is, this new organizational form is more effective, treats talent and energy as a precious resource, and is designed to harness the true source of competitive advantage in the years to come: human creativity.
— The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries
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