“If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to solve homelessness.” “New York City has sparkling glass-and-steel skyscrapers with multi-million-dollar luxury condos, yet ten yards from their entrances are homeless people who go to sleep hungry.” These observations are almost cliché. You could say them about any city or country. They show deep misunderstandings about the problems they describe, which keep us from solving them.[…] Keep reading →

Teams with members with diverse experience and skills outperform teams without diversity, as I understand research shows. My experience is consistent with that view. I am a huge fan of diversity, and, for that matter, equality. Many people promote having more women in areas where there are fewer—in leadership, in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), in college, and so on. Searching on the topic on the web shows plenty[…] Keep reading →

Continuing my series of alternative responses to the New York Times column, The Ethicists, looking at the consequences of one’s actions instead of imposing values on others, here is my take on today’s post, ”Slaughter for Hire” (The New York Times Magazine seems to be doing a special issue this weekend without an Ethicist column so I’m pulling up an old one, from May 30, 2014.) I have recently been[…] Keep reading →

I hear people consistently say that if the climate warms the market will correct it. I think they mean that they expect new technologies will help solve the problem and that market forces will lead costs of pollution to drop and so sustainable energy sources will become more affordable. In a corporate context, “correction” almost always means that some companies or divisions will lose many and some may go bankrupt,[…] Keep reading →

I talk about mental models and beliefs and how they determine how you live. Two researchers (“Building a Better America−−One Wealth Quintile at a Time,” Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely, Perspectives on Psychological Science 2011 6: 9) asked Americans about their views on how wealth is distributed among Americans. The chart below summarizes some results. The top bar, “Actual,” shows the distribution of wealth owned by each fifth of[…] Keep reading →

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about a group I’m in with a leadership vacuum, “How to handle leadership issues when you don’t have authority.” Several people in that group wrote with appreciation for the message in that post. None wrote to say they had problems with it, though the person with authority did push back slightly. Then after an anonymous comment from an attendee of one of my seminars[…] Keep reading →

If you’ve sat in a traffic jam on a highway, you’ve thought to yourself “If they only built an extra lane, I could pass all this congestion. Why don’t they build an extra lane to this highway? Or build an alternative route?” This type of questioning led to building many new roads and widening many existing ones for decades. Eventually people realized the flaws in that thinking. University of Toronto[…] Keep reading →