Outright drunkenness is relatively easy to characterize, even though its symptoms vary from person to person, ranging from volubility to introspection, excitement to sadness. Concentration and coordination go out the window; maybe you slur your words. You get tired. You try to put your elbow on the bar and miss. That’s what happens when you have around 17 millimoles of ethanol per liter of blood, or 80 milligrams per every deciliter—sometimes also written “0.08 mg%,” or 0.08 blood alcohol content, the legal standard for intoxication in most parts of the United States. At higher concentrations, ethanol is a classic depressant of the central nervous system. Between 250 and 300 mg/dl, for example, it’s an anesthetic. You’re conked out, insensitive to pain. At 400 mg/dl ethanol is a solvent; that level of ingestion is fatal.
there’s a certain amount of creativity in design, but that’s just one part of a very meaty, robust toolkit. Teaching a designer to be creative without teaching them ethics is akin to a medical school teaching a surgeon how to open up a torso without teaching them how internal organs work. Anyone who wants a career as a designer is going to need to speak about someone’s business and organizational goals. They’re going to have to learn how to analyze data, and how to measure effectiveness. They’re going to have to learn how to build and extend brands and to do goal-driven work. Most of all, they need to learn how to measure the effectiveness of their own work. Not only for the company, but more importantly for society at large. Design is not about expressing yourself. Design is not about following your dream. Design is not about becoming a creative. Design is about keeping people from doing terrible things to other people.
Maybe histamines, the stuff of allergic responses. Red wine, white wine, sake, and beer all contain histamine, though studies go back and forth on which drink has the most. Some say it’s red wine, but others don’t find much difference among the various drinks.
Embrace the Use of Catchphrases: When you look at successful groups, a lot of their internal language features catchphrases that often sound obvious, rah-rah, or corny. Many of us instinctively dismiss them as cultish jargon. But this is a mistake. Their occasionally cheesy obviousness is not a bug—it’s a feature. Their clarity, grating to the outsider’s ear, is precisely what helps them function. The trick to building effective catchphrases is to keep them simple, action-oriented, and forthright: “Create fun and a little weirdness” (Zappos), “Talk less, do more” (IDEO), “Work hard, be nice” (KIPP), “Pound the rock” (San Antonio Spurs), “Leave the jersey in a better place” (New Zealand All-Blacks), “Create raves for guests” (Danny Meyer’s restaurants). They’re hardly poetry, but they share an action-based clarity. They aren’t gentle suggestions so much as clear reminders, crisp nudges in the direction the group wants to go.
You, my friend, have a hangover. Scientists have a more inscrutable name for it: veisalgia, from the Greek word for “pain,” algia, and kveis, a Norwegian word meaning “uneasiness following debauchery.” That sounds about right.
MARBURY V. MADISON overturned a section of a law passed by Congress. This was no novelty, either in theory or in practice. “Whenever a particular statute contravenes the Constitution,” Alexander Hamilton had written in Federalist 78, “it will be the duty of the judicial tribunals to adhere to the latter and disregard the former.” Marshall himself, in his speech on the judiciary at the Virginia Ratifying Convention, had said that if Congress made a law that infringed on the Constitution, judges “would declare it void.”
The anti-inflammatory Clotam, the vitamin B6 analogue pyritinol, Ayurvedic herbal compound Liv.52, and Opuntia ficus indica extract are the only four medicines or supplements that actual clinical trials have shown to be at all effective in treating hangovers. Add dihydromyricetin to the list—the thing Olsen isolated—even though it hasn’t had rigorous human trials. This is a chunk of information so vital that it demands a stunt.
Ethanol is a particularly cool molecule. It’s a solvent, which means lots of different molecules that don’t dissolve in water will dissolve in a solution of ethanol. It’s odorless, colorless, and it burns really well—a sign of a good fuel. It’s also a potent microbicide. When yeasts squirt it into their environment, it kills off local bacterial and fungal competition.
Surprisingly, there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor with scattered exceptions in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as it marked up the Second Amendment. James Madison’s original proposal, in fact, included a provision for conscientious objectors.
Instead of constantly overreacting, we can use theory to make a more nuanced choice. In a complex world, decentralization offers many benefits, but we need to maintain collective coherence. To achieve this, we can leverage transparency, social pressure, and principles. What simple rules would have to be in place to allow local or decentralized authority and action in perpetuity? And when centralization seems to make sense—as with some software platforms or shared data sources—I use one question to clarify my position: which structure will make us faster and more adaptive? Whatever that is, centralized, decentralized, or somewhere in between, I’m for that one.
Heat—thermal energy—is actually mechanical movement, and in a solid with springy interatomic attachments like copper, that energy creates tiny whorls called phonons that move through the medium like a wave of sound does through air. When someone says that a metal like gold, silver, or copper is a good conductor of heat, what they’re really saying is that the metal is good at propagating phonons. And copper’s crystal structure, the way its atoms line up in bulk, is really good for working into new shapes—its atomic crystals are smoother on their faces than in other metals, so they slide across each other, metallurgically speaking.
Now entire organizations are attempting to achieve “agility at scale,” believing that it will be a remedy for all their problems. Unfortunately, in their desire to be agile (with a lowercase a), many firms have attempted to do Agile (with an uppercase A). They have traded a goal for an orthodoxy—adopting the methods and certifications but not the theory behind them. And this is fatal. Because an agile workflow is not an operating system. The common practices of Agile development offer little advice to someone wondering about organizational structure, or human development, or compensation, or a thousand other questions that will emerge as you go. And even if it were comprehensive, you cannot cut and paste an OS any more than you can cut and paste a personality. You have to do the work.
to avoid the pitfalls of organizational debt, we need constant and vigilant simplification. We need to create roles, rules, and processes that are inherently agile—built to learn and change. Unfortunately, the very bureaucracy that created our org debt also stands in the way of addressing it. Org debt creates bureaucracy, and bureaucracy protects org debt. It’s a tragic love affair.
Complex systems are typically made up of a large number of interacting components—people, ants, brain cells, startups—that together exhibit adaptive or emergent behavior without requiring a leader or central control. As a result, complex systems are more about the relationships and interactions among their components than about the components themselves. And these interactions give rise to unpredictable behavior. If a system surprises you, or has the potential to surprise you, it is likely complex. Software is complicated. Creating a software startup is complex. An airplane is complicated. What happens between the people on board is complex.
Contrary to popular opinion, among people who study systems theory, “complicated” and “complex” are distinct words with precise meanings. The engine inside a car is complicated. A complicated system is a causal system—meaning it is subject to cause and effect. Although it may have many parts, they will interact with one another in highly predictable ways. Problems with complicated systems have solutions. This means that, within reason, a complicated system can be fixed with a high degree of confidence. It can be controlled. This is not to say that a complicated system can’t be confusing or inaccessible to the layperson. Quite the contrary. Understanding a complicated system, such as an engine or a 3-D printer, requires specialized expertise and experience. Here, experts can detect patterns and provide solutions based on established good practice. This is the domain of the mechanic, the watchmaker, the air traffic controller, the architect, and the engineer. Traffic, on the other hand, is complex. A complex system is not causal, it’s dispositional. We can make informed guesses about what it is likely to do (its disposition), but we can’t be sure. We can make predictions about the weather, but we cannot control it. Unlike complicated problems, complex problems cannot be solved, only managed. They cannot be controlled, only nudged. This is the domain of the butterfly effect, where a small change can lead to something big, and a big change might barely make a dent. Here expertise can be a disadvantage if it becomes dogma or blinds us to the inherent uncertainty present in our situation.
Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape, once quipped, “Saying that the purpose of a company is to make money is like saying that your purpose in life is to breathe.”
While many of the activities and outputs of organizations are indeed complicated, the organization itself is complex. Accordingly, organizational culture isn’t a problem to be solved; it’s an emergent phenomenon that we have to cultivate.
