Business Week* reports on a management fad from India, that goes by a Hindi slang word, jugaad (say joo-gaardh). It means “an improvisational style of innovation”. It’s “inexpensive invention on the fly”. It sometimes has negative connotations, like cutting corners. The idea is that it doesn’t have to be perfect or fancy; it’s just good… Read More Jugaad and Bricolage
I like this story from the 15 October 2009 issue of the journal Nature, about how a pair of blogs allowed dozens of contributors to collaboratively solve a theorem that no single mathematician had been able to solve: the Density Hales-Jewitt Theorem (DHJ for short). The mathematician who created the blog was Timothy Gowers, a… Read More Massively Collaborative Mathematics
I’ve just read a classic psychological study* by Mary Gick and Susan McGarry, published in 1992. They conducted a series of four experiments to test whether your problem solving ability could be enhanced, if you had previously worked on a very similar type of problem. The target problem was the “mutilated checkerboard” problem (see figure… Read More Failures Make You Stronger
No, it’s not a band, it’s a writer’s collective in Bologna, Italy. This is the group that has collaboratively authored several best-selling novles, including Q and ’54. Q was published under the name “Luther Blissett” (after a “cultural guerilla warfare” project in 1994 where hundreds of people around Europe pulled off hoaxes using the name… Read More Wu Ming
A new book by Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate, presents evidence that babies are born to be social and to help others. Tomasello argues that helping others is genetic, rather than learned. This is an important contribution to the “altruism” debate–why would a rational (i.e. self-interested) person expend energy helping someone else? The standard answer… Read More Innate Cooperation
The Creativity Guru 