“That is the key task of a jobs strategy today - we have to make service class jobs good jobs. The way to do that is to begin to improve the quality of those jobs and to see service class workers as sources of innovation, continuous improvement, and productivity gains. Service class jobs are the last frontier of real inefficiency in the economy. Already, companies like The Container Store, Whole Foods, Best Buy, The Four Seasons, and Starbucks are developing new and better strategies to engage their workers, improve pay, and promote from within. These efforts are in their infancy…”
—Richard Florida » Where Service Jobs Will Be - The Atlantic
August 2010
7 posts
“The real secret is that the universe doesn’t give a goddamn about us, doesn’t dream, doesn’t wish, doesn’t hope. The real power is that science gives us the tools to wrench the pointless detritus of reality into the shape that we dream of, to impose our wishes on the substrate. We don’t achieve that by lying abed and hoping really hard, though — we do it with work and real knowledge…”
—Here comes the sequel to The Secret, The Power : Pharyngula
“Nassim Taleb once advised people to ignore any news you don’t hear in a social context. From people you know and, ideally, face to face. You have two combinatorial filters in social communication. First, you’ve chosen to talk with these people, and second, they’ve chosen to bring it up. Those two filters—a social and an importance filter—are really good ways of identifying what really matters to people. If I hear about news through social means, and if I hear about it three times, then I pay attention.”
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From Chris Anderson: What I Read | The Atlantic Wire
— one of the most interesting and elaborate entries in this cool series.
“They use information as a weapon. That is a huge violation to the geek ethic, where you’re supposed to be transparent and knowable and systematized. This is where I think managers get bad reputations, hiding information or doling it out as he or she sees fit.”
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Geeks at work - O’Reilly Radar
I was just thinking about an old ‘Rands in Repose’ post last night. I’m not a developer but his book still looks interesting.
Play
“And so I knew what it was that I wanted to do… but I just did not have a clue how to get to that point. But it seemed to me that getting paid to write stories was closer to that goal than running a cash register at the supermarket. So I took a cut in pay, and I became a newspaper reporter.”
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So begins the story of “Black Hawk Down” author Mark Bowden on discovering narrative and the value of beginner’s mind:
“only if you are truly ignorant can you ask the truly ignorant question”
