TYLER
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Years ago, one of my favorite mentors shared his view that if you don’t understand an idea well enough to explain it using an analogy, you don’t understand it. In hindsight, I think this was his version of the quote attributed to Einstein that “if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Over
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It seems that people have been inventing stories to make sense of events for as long as people have been. Nassem Taleb, in Fooled by Randomness, commented about people’s tendency to create narratives to explain events. In his view, people tended to create deterministic narratives to explain random events or outcomes that resulted from uncertainty. Taleb believes that “You
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Years ago, I decided to accept a position that led to me transitioning from a high-volume industry with frequent product changeover and intense market forces to a low-volume industry with greatly reduced connectivity to market dynamics. My boss at the time provided me a bit of perspective and advice that has stuck with me over the
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Real systems are messy, noisy, difficult to measure, and can be a challenge to control. Organizations and organizational dynamics often exhibit analogous behavior. In control systems, it is common to analyze linear single input single output systems. There is a lot that can be done with those tools. However, applying these tools comes with accepting some compromises. Addressing complexity
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Organizations, like spacecraft, rockets, and airplanes, rely on guidance, navigation, and control systems. Recently, I have been thinking about the similarities between guidance, navigation and control (GN&C) systems, the management and leadership systems in organizations, and how learnings from one type of system might be useful to the other type of system. At their core, GN&C
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When I was in college, much of the physics curriculum didn’t quite take for me. As I got later in my academic career, some of the ideas started to make more sense. Now, many years later, I have been seeking to relearn some of the material. To be honest, some of that relearning is probably learning things for
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Years ago, my first boss after I finished graduate school shared his beliefs that “all learning applies to everything else” and that “more brains are better for every job.” I learned more from him than I have probably learned from any of my subsequent bosses. Maybe that was him. Maybe that is because of where I was then
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Churchill’s writing style is one that is particularly approachable and engaging for me. His books on the Second World War, in my opinion, are an incredibly interesting perspective on that arc of history. I have always been fascinated by the contrast in strategic philosophies between Churchill and Eisenhower. I don’t recall ever coming across anything
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Each of our kids is learning things that have stretched my mind. This includes places where I have learned (or relearned) math and philosophy just to keep up. On the math front, I have had to relearn some calculus and differential equations to keep up and help with homework. That has been more enjoyable than
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Years ago, one of my mentors shared the line above as being the summary in an appendix of a book on numerical analysis that he had studied years before our conversation. The full line was “verily I say unto thee, ye compute for insight. Thy numbers are but chaff.” I often reflect on that idea.
Musings of an Analyst 