These two "E-F-F" words are what drives a lot of what happens in society today. If you want to run a successful business or a successful organization, you've gotta find a way to increase your efficiency, while maximizing your effectiveness. But which one is more important? As is often the case in life, it depends …
On Judging a Book, er, Manager by its Cover
There's been some news recently regarding the Toronto Maple Leafs that's, well, that's frankly, the very opposite of heart-warming. And hearing this news, put some other news in a different light for me. Before we get to that, let's back up to the 2014 Olympics in Russia. Heading into the '14 Olympics, Canada returned its …
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Square Peg for a Square Hole Inside of a Square
Every couple of weeks or so, Ben Thompson from Stratechery and James Allworth from Harvard Business Review sit down to talk tech and society. On their most recent episode, I couldn't help but think of some of the parallel applications to the public service. At around the 30-minute mark of the podcast, the two start …
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The Key to Making Good Decisions
Sorry for the clickbait-y post title. To be honest, I toyed with the idea of having a 15-20 word headline and then decided against it. Of course, there are lots of important factors that go into making good decisions and there's been plenty of that written about online (including here on this very website). There …
Whose Thinking Is It, Anyway?
Consciousness has always been a topic that's fascinated me. How do we know that we're aware? How do we know that other people are aware? Where is consciousness? Who's voice is that in my head? Do other people have voices in their heads? Fascinating. There are a couple of things I've come across recently that, if …
Quick Thoughts: Making a Difference and Honouring Future Ancestors
It's kind of amazing how quickly things start to pile up and one's good intentions, the proverbial "best laid plans," are thrown to the wayside. When I first came back to writing here, my intention, my plan, was to write every workday. Slowly, I relaxed my goal to three days a week (as a way …
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Dumb Luck, Predestined Fate, or Neither
There's lots that could be said on today's anniversary, but the one piece that stood out to me is in The Atlantic -- On 9/11, Luck Meant Everything: When the terrorist attacks happened, trivial decisions spared people’s lives—or sealed their fate. I don't want to copy/paste the whole article here, so I'll just include the …
Science is Awesome: Humans Can Breathe Liquid
Depending upon one's teachers at school when they were younger (or older), there can be an affinity for or a strong aversion from science. I remember fondly some of the teachers I had in science (and then in physics and chemistry, when I was able to pick different topics in science). Heck, I even remember …
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Life is a Gift — and so is Suffering
A few weeks ago, there was a rather poignant interview that aired between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper. I didn't see or read much of the coverage of it, but the thing that kept coming across my feed was the first thirty seconds of the clip below. And, in seeing the views on this video, …
Uncertainty: Accounting for Known and Unknown Outcomes
Note: for the last few posts, I've been exhausting the store-house of prewritten pieces from other websites that I hadn't yet transferred to this website. I believe all have been posted here now, so let's return to our regularly scheduled programming. I've had an article saved on Pocket for a few months now with a …
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Jeremiah Stanghini 