Lulu
Company culture and the holy grail of autonomy
It’s been said that the key to a happy, fulfilling career is to find roles that give you 3 things: a sense of motivating purpose, opportunities to attain mastery of sufficiently challenging work, and the autonomy to feel in control of your own outcomes. From a management perspective, I think where a company can really [...]
Where Harvard and humanity meet
Just got around to watching Tina Fey’s appearance on GoogleTalks. Loved her observation, originally from SNL creator Lorne Michaels, that the best conditions for improv usually come about when you mix “Harvard people” with “college dropouts.” Elaborating on the broad brushstrokes, it’s the creative dynamic you get by swirling cerebral with visceral, methodical with adventurous. [...]
The history of a city is inscribed in its streets
Manhattanism is the one urbanistic ideology that has fed, from its conception, on the splendors and miseries of the metropolitan condition—hyper-density—without once losing faith in it as the basis for a desirable modern culture. -Rem Koolhaas What the Museum of the City of New York lacks in a memorable, rolls off your tongue kind of [...]
FOML, or fear of missing a link
Totally new to website design and information architecture, but I’ve found that gauging my level of “link anxiety” is a pretty accurate indicator of how well a site has been laid out. You know the feeling. FOML is most common when you’re fielding an open-ended search, where you have a general sense of what you’re [...]
Build me up buttercup, just don’t break my heart
Four times a year, around earnings season, the job of a public company CFO and that of a New York City maître d’ don’t seem too different. It all comes down to managing expectations. The staff at Clinton Street Baking Company are so good at it they can make you feel happy to have waited “only” [...]
Perspective
For over a week Haroon had let the letter sit unopened in the bottom drawer of his nightstand. Then one morning, he found it staring up at him from the dining room table. Shuba emerged from the kitchen with a plate of dosa and a near-empty container of yogurt. She set the items down between [...]
Conversational habits
1. Frame any interaction in the context of improv’s golden rule. No matter what, your response is “Yes, and…” 2. Never be afraid to ask. You’re underestimating people’s desire to be helpful.
Five senses
taste We joke that were we ever to lose you in a foreign country, we’d know exactly where to look first. “Excuse me, where’s a good place to get a bowl of noodle soup?” Remember the time we took you to Chez Nous for your birthday and you insisted the meal was lovely and you [...]
Dear laundromat black hole,
It started with a few socks here and there. Maybe you thought I wouldn’t notice, at least for awhile, maybe you thought I wouldn’t care. Both fair assessments, though I do miss the right half of my fuzzy purple pair now that winter’s here. I can’t blame the socks too much for deserting. Consigned to [...]
The hipster antidote
Tourists don’t get a lot of love from the worker bees who commute to Times Square. The catalogue of complaints is long: They travel in packs at a pace slightly faster than the advance of molten magma. They stop in the middle of intersections without warning to consult a map. They whack you in the [...]
