As I sat there in front of my screen developing the spreadsheet/tool that was to be shared with the more than hundred salespeople in the company I realised I had doubts - would this really work? Was this an improvement to what they already had? Or was it more change for the sake of change?... Continue Reading →
The passionate introvert
This TED talk really surprised me. The content was great, but it was Brian Little's delivery that really made me go "wow!" So many times during the talk it felt I wasn't listening to him talk on the subject of "personality" but rather his grandchildren. His passion was evident, and his joy contagious. I couldn't... Continue Reading →
Deciphering Fake
This was supposed to be a post on radical transparency. But an article bashing radical transparency just left me feeling so outraged with its lies and misleading statements that I just spent the last four hours of my life writing this warning to all of us media-consumers out there: Don't trust all you see, even if it... Continue Reading →
Supposedly Irrelevant Factors
I'm halfway through reading one of the best books I've read in a long while: Misbehaving, by Richard H. Thaler. One of the things that most stuck with me was that of "supposedly irrelevant factors", which refers to something that, in theory, should not affect or influence the thinking of a rational person but does. Thaler... Continue Reading →
Anticipation, proactivity, and the Invisibles
Just read an article via Slashdot on this thing called "Tab Warming" that the Mozilla team is testing for the Firefox Web Browser. I won't go into the details, but in essence what Tab Warming does is that it anticipates whether or not you'll click on a link, and if it does it "paints" the page... Continue Reading →
The difficulties of doing “deep work”
These past two weeks I've been on leave, staying at home and being a dad to my 2-year-old son. He's got quite a standard schedule: the wife and I bring him out in the morning to let him "see the world", have breakfast, and/or visit the grandparents etc.; he comes back around noon, takes a... Continue Reading →
Feeling good about one’s work
I was just "thinking about things" when this thought came into my head: To feel good about one's work, there are two sides of validation: the internal and the external. External validation: somebody tells you, "you've done well. This is excellent!" Internal validation: you tell yourself, "you've done well; you'd set out to do something... Continue Reading →
Please let me know if you have any questions
"Please let me know if you have any questions," wrote I in an email I was drafting. It has long been my signature email sign-off, but this time I was feeling a little reflective and reconsidered writing that line. What did it really mean? But try as I might I couldn't quite put my finger on... Continue Reading →
Perspective: Million vs. Billion
"How long is a million seconds? How many days do you think that is?" I asked."I don't know," she said, then started counting, realised it was pretty hard to do in your head, then stopped.I gave her the answer: "approximately 11 days"."Now," I continued, "how about a billion? How many days is a billion seconds?"This... Continue Reading →
Getting Excited About Small Data
The next few quarters for analytics in my company are, from my perspective, going to be game-changing, and I'm excited to say my team's taking the lead on it: from machine learning and advanced visualisations to new ways of thinking about data, we're currently taking the steps to get to what I call "the next... Continue Reading →
Donn, fragments 