Ever wonder why Monopoly feels unfair? It was supposed to teach why capitalism as bad! The original game started similarly, but any two players could vote to switch to progressive rules that nationalized the utilities & railroad and switched the "Jail” space to“Free College" 1/
The game was invented by feminist & polymath Elizabeth Magie, who patented it in 1903. But variants spread quickly, and it was even used in Wharton economics classes to "to show the antisocial nature of monopoly,” before being co-opted by the Parker Bros. simulations.wharton.upenn.edu/2016/03/10/mon…
Also the original names of the properties: “Lord Blueblood’s Estate,” “The Soakum Lighting Co.,” and “Hogg’s Game Preserve” are much better then the Atlantic City streets we ended up with.
The Wharton prof who used the game in class is also a reason we now have tenure at Wharton & elsewhere. He was forced out of the school by the Board for his stances against child labor, causing an outcry. (Later he was also kicked out of the Communist Party for being too radical)
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Thing to never do again: open offices. In addition to being terrible places to work, (they actually lower communication!) they are 🦠parties . Sick days are 62% higher than individual offices. Even group offices are better, six person rooms have 30% less sick days than open plans
Maybe you don't care about getting sick, because you just want to talk to people. But open offices also kill socialization! Face-to-face communication among office workers actually drops by 70%(!!) in open plan offices, since people hide away from others. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.109…
Also, lets talk noise. Open office noise is a really subtle thing. In surveys, people think that they can concentrate in open office environments, but study after study shows that they are much worse at concentrating than they think. And noise cancelling headphones don't help...
Here’s a super useful paper: we spend 15% of work in meetings (managers spend 50%!) & post-COVID meetings are up 14%. But we spend too little time trying to make meetings better, even though there’s lots of research on the topic! Here’s a review of it all: researchgate.net/publication/32…
Here’s an emoji filled summary of best practices. Before the meeting:
✅only meet if needed
👯♀️make sure to only invite people who need to be there.
🎯set clear goals & outcomes
📄have an agenda that all review in advance
⏰make it short & relevant to all invited
During the meeting...
⏱arrive on time
📋follow the agenda
🙋♀️🙋♂️everyone participates
💻📱never multitask
⚔️intervene if mood turns negative
🤪humor helps performance
🙅♀️leave time for objections
🗳Let everyone help decision-making. If a decision is made, tell everyone
A thread on an important topic that not enough people know about: the s-curve. It shows us how technologies develop, and it helps explain a lot about how and when certain technologies win, and when startups should enter a market. I'll illustrate with the history of the ebook! 1/n
The S-curve shows you how a technology's capabilities change over time and investment. But I want to start with a caveat: when and why this happens is complex. If you want to know more about those complexities, this article is a good place to start. 2/ hbs.edu/ris/Publicatio…
Technologies usually begin with an "Era of Ferment" where everyone knows a new tech is coming, but companies experiment with possible forms. In the case of e-books, there were lots of options: In-bookstore printing! Serials you paid for by the chapter! The Sony Data Discman! 3/
A tweet is about 1kb of memory*. All of the pictured things can store one tweet:
Two Babbage Analytical Engines
37 punch cards
A Russian woven electronic core memory module
This hard drive built inside Minecraft
*280 characters of up to 4 eight byte octets each in UTF-8.
For reference, the Apollo Guidance Computer, which got humans to the moon, did so with an amount of memory equivalent to 8 tweets.
Scientists have also successfully built logic gates by using swarms of soldier crabs. It takes about 80 🦀 to operate a logic gate, and there are 8 logic gates in a byte, so 640,000 crabs can be used to store a single tweet. Which seems kind of horrifying. 🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀🦀
A third of all genetics papers published in Nature over a decade (and 20% across all journals) had errors due to the fact that many gene have names like SEPT2 (the official name of Septin 2), which were automatically coded as dates by Microsoft Excel. genomebiology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Also an Excel error cost led to an estimated 1,500 deaths in the UK last year. The UK COVID contact tracing effort saved to an old Excel file format (.XLS) rather than the new one (.XLSX) & smaller row limits resulted in names being dropped. They were never contacted by tracers.
It was easier to change genetics than to change Excel (or to get people to stop using Excel to track data it wasn’t built for... or to get people to understand how to format cells). 27 genes have so far been renamed to deal with the date problem.
I think we underestimate how much COVID disruption will help big organizations in the long run. So many bad routines were disrupted, and new improvisation rewarded. Reminds me of this paper: when star NBA players are injured the rest of the team has improve & create new patterns.
I’ve been talking to people at big companies that thought they would not have been able to make the switch to online, and it is clear that the sudden disruption to routines led to revelations. It is like a version of @work_matters & Rao’s subtraction game. hbr.org/2014/02/scalin…
Plus, the fact that every other competitor was disrupted in at the same time meant a breather from competitive pressure during the most confusing period. And the backstop of government aid helped, too.
So the real question is: what did your company learn from COVID practices?