Effective today, June 8, 2009, General Motors and Citigroup are no longer components of the Dow 30. In and of itself this news has no great relevance, but it does highlight how fast today’s economy continues to change. As I mentioned the other day on my other blog (www.jumpthecurve.net), many people think that "tomorrow will…

In honor of David Hume, today's addition to the anti-library is his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Related Posts Unlearning 101: Lesson 1 Unlearning 101: Lesson 2 Unlearning 101: Lesson 3

What we don't know is as important — if not more important — than what we do know. Therefore, I am starting an anti-library — a compilation of books I haven't read — which will serve to remind me of my ignorance. I got the idea after reading Nassim Taleb's outstanding book, The Black Swan….

"No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion." — David Hume The moral of the story: Start Watching for Black Swans

David Brooks has an excellent opinion piece in today’s paper. Here’s the operative quote: “this financial meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It’s a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren’t true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.”

In 2005, I wrote a book on General George C. Marshall entitled "Soldier, Statesman, Peacemaker: Leadership Lessons from George C. Marshall." One of my favorite quotes of Marshall’s is the advice he pounded into the heads of his junior officers: "Study the first six months of the next war." It was great advice in the…

”I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it….

The future is unknowable. There are far too many variables for even the most foresighted individual or powerful supercomputer to accurately forecast what tomorrow—let alone next year or the next decade—will look like with precision. Nevertheless, this fact neither discounts the importance of forecasting, nor does it diminish the work that those individuals (myself included)…

In 1899, just a few years before the Wright brothers achieved their historic accomplishment, Lord Kelvin — then one of the world’s brightest men and most accomplished scientists — declared heavier than air machines to be "impossible." He was wrong. To add insult to injury, Lord Kelvin was proved wrong by a pair of bicycle…

A few weeks back I had a posting  entitled "Change or Die … Unnecessarily” in which I provided a few examples of how our inability to unlearn could, quite literally, cost some people their lives. Well, the other day, one of my favorite thinkers, Josh Wolfe, sent me a copy his weekly newsletter, The Forbes/Wolfe…