Business, Tech, Consulting, Analytics

The over-filtered life Whether in business or personal life, we make an effort to cross-check what we think is reality to what we hear and see.  It is part of being human, and we do it constantly.  We like to think that business decisions, anything affecting our personal wealth, are based on objective reality. Unfortunately, our thinking gets polluted every day.  What do the extreme right, moderate right, middle of the road, moderate left and extreme left all have in common?  They all listen to news which is highly -- actually extremely -- biased towards the negative.  Despite ourselves we are influenced by waves of "ain't it awful" rhetoric.  The information we receive from the outside is not balanced. It is unrealistically filtered so that destructive or at least worsening conditions are front and center.  For example, the average person in Africa lives better than most Americans did a few hundred years ago.  But how many times do we see...

Explore/Exploit--The endless question You’re in a hurry to finish a spreadsheet. You can enter numbers by brute or you can spend a few minutes with Google to figure out a better way. Or maybe you need to write a quick note to HR so you pick up a pen and start scribbling. And then you think of something else that needs to be said--at what point did you cross the line between the quick startup of the handy pen and the slow start but much faster typing in Word? I don’t remember where I read the term but “explore/exploit” has always struck me as one of the key decision points in a productive life. Delay of productive activity is built into the time you spend exploring. Nothing visible is getting done. And you might explore and fail. In elementary school children are not typically told about the large number of settlers who went west and then returned east. So short term, searching for new solutions seems wasteful. The alternative is to stay in some endless loop of what you already kn...