Education as a Stock of Options
Society is used to treating a diploma as a report card on human quality: higher education promises intelligence and flexibility, its absence a narrow horizon. In fact education is valuable…
Delegate something other than a copy of yourself
Delegation is not handing unpleasant work to a person nobody remembered to give the context to. For someone else to carry out a task, he needs: the expected result; quality…
A Message for the Recipient
Business culture likes brevity, intellectual culture likes completeness. A good message does not choose between them in the abstract: it gives the particular recipient exactly the context needed to understand…
Defect or feature
The culture of self-acceptance likes turning every flaw into a hidden virtue. The formula is pleasant, but it sometimes prevents you from recognising a real defect and deciding whether it…
Hard does not mean right
In everyday morality, difficulty counts almost automatically as proof of value. A decision that came hard looks more honest, and suffering lends the choice some weight. But difficulty is a…
An Estimate for the Impossible
The word “impossible” often hides a more precise constraint. The psychologists Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross asked people to estimate how long their own tasks would take —…