by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Recommended Books
AT&T’s Bell Labs can be credited with inventing the 20th Century, having created the transistor, solar cell, trans-continental and trans-Atlantic telephone cables, and communication satellites, not to mention digital audio and information theory. How they did it is the story of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner. Here are some excerpts.
On Vision:
AT&T’s savior was Theodore Vail, who became its president in 1907,… (p. 18)… His publicity department had come up with a slogan that was meant to rally its public image, but Vail himself soon adopted it as the company’s core philosophical principle as well. [16] It was simple enough:
“One policy, one system, universal service.”
That this was a kind of wishful thinking seemed not to matter. (p. 20)
…in any company’s greatest achievements one might, with the clarity of hindsight, locate the beginnings of its own demise. (p. 186). [See also on this blog, Your greatest strength is your #1 blind spot.]
On Management:
Measurement devices that could assess things like loudness, signal strength, and channel capacity didn’t exist, so they, too, had to be created— for it was impossible to study and improve something unless it could be measured. (p. 48).
“You get paid for the seven and a half hours a day you put in here,” Kelly often told new Bell Labs employees in his speech to them on their first day, “but (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, Stress Management
One pattern I noticed while reading about the physicists and mathematicians who invented quantum mechanics and built the atomic bomb was the number of key insights that came to them while hiking and walking. At first, I thought this might have been a mere cultural coincidence. Many of these scientists were turn-of-the-century central Europeans; perhaps walking was just a common hobby amongst this group?
I have since noticed that (more…)
by Tony Mayo | For Executive Coaches
I heard US Poet Laureate Charles Simic respond to the question, “What is poetry for?” He reported that the best answer he has heard came from one of his students.
Poetry reminds people of their humanity.
Coaching conversations are poetry, too.
by Tony Mayo | For Business Owners, For Executive Coaches, How to Set Goals
“For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds.”
…
“In fact, I think now that the two abilities – finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don’t just tell us what’s true – they tell us what’s possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don’t think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.”
The World Question Center at Edge.org
Alison Gopnik
Psychologist, UC-Berkeley
Coauthor, The Scientist In the Crib
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