Business

Balancing Innovation and Familiarity with the MAYA Design Principle

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The MAYA (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable) design principle suggests that the best design falls between entirely new solutions and those that are familiar. The goal is to create something advanced enough to capture interest yet familiar enough to be accessible to users. Industrial designer Raymond Loewy developed this concept through his experience designing iconic products such as the Coca-Cola bottle, the US Postal Service logo, the NASA spacecraft, and the Air Force One plane for U.S. presidents. Loewy advocated for a gradual design evolution, …

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Avoiding Perverse Incentives

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Part 1: When Incentives Fail. A Story about Rats, Cobras, Nails, and Atrocities.  Part 2: Avoiding Perverse Incentives  When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law (adversarial Goodhart)  Perverse incentives are compensations with unintended or undesirable consequences that encourage people to act in unethical or harmful ways.   Telltale signs of perverse incentives might include: How to Fight against the Negative Consequences of Perverse Incentives? Let’s consider a practical example: a company that wants to offer bonuses to employees who …

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Wise Ideas from Morgan Housel’s Book The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness

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One of the better books about financial education that I have read is Morgan Housel’s book, The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness. This book started as a blog post that can be read here. Some sharp insights in this book struck me, and I will discuss them in more detail in the following paragraphs.  Investing is not the study of finance but how people behave with money The premise of this book is that doing well with money has little to …

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What Holds Back Innovation

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The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. Sherlock Holmes  For at least five millennia, we used wheels for transportation, from carts to cars, trains, pushchairs, bicycles, etc. Across ages, we also had heavy trunks to carry luggage. To help with the workload of carrying bags, we used carts with wheels to transport them because wheeling bags was much easier than lugging them. But still, for all the creative minds and visionaries that humankind had across centuries, it …

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AI’s Impact on the Future of Jobs

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May you live in interesting times.   An English expression that is claimed to be a translation of a traditional Chinese curse The First Industrial Revolution brought us the steam engine, while the Second Industrial Revolution focused on steel production, chemicals, electricity. The Third Industrial Revolution, called the Digital Revolution, was characterized by the invention of the Internet and the World Wide Web. How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution look? Profoundly exciting and highly problematic. New vistas will open where incredible breakthroughs can happen because AI holds enormous potential. This …

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Shoshin, the Zen Concept that Applies to Companies, Science and Personal Development

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“In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s, there are few.”  Zen master Shunryo Suzuki  In Zen Buddhism, “shoshin” translates as the “beginner’s mind”, where “sho” means beginning or origin, and “shin” means spirit, soul, or attitude.  A beginner’s mind is different from being a beginner. Shoshin is about having the attitude and mindset of a novice who learns a new practice for the first time, especially after reaching expert levels in our fields.    In the beginner’s mind, there is a lack of preconceptions, a willingness to learn, to ask and try, …

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Types of People in a Company: Liquid, Rocks, and Islands

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As I said goodbye to my last job, I started to think about all the people I met there. While creating this mental list, I began to see a pattern. There were faces with no names, names that made me smile, and names that made me feel grateful. First, there are liquid people who fill a void, but when the door is opened, their names are gone from one’s mind. You might see them again on the streets, wave at them, but still, you …

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