Little bets

Johnnie Moore

Johnnie Moore

I’m Johnnie Moore, and I help people work better together

Bob Sutton points to some interesting sources on the value of little ideas.

He reviews Little Bets a new book by Peter Sims.

This modern masterpiece demonstrates that the most powerful and profitable ideas are produced by persistent people who mess with lots of little ideas and keep muddling forward until they get it right.

He also spots Shawn Acor’s book The Happiness Advantage and this related article. I fastened on this argument:

Goals that are too big paralyze you. They literally shut off your brain says Achor… The amygdala, the part of the brain that responds to fear and threats, hijacks the “thinker” part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, says Achor. The amygdala steals resources from the prefrontal cortex, the creative part of the brain that makes decisions and sees possibilities.

Share Post

More Posts

It’s all connected

Tim Kastelle passes on this rather nice Diderot quote from the new book Superconnect: Everything is linked together… beings are connected with each other by

Agile Procurement

Dominic Campbell’s challenge to clumsy government procurement has the best title of the year – It’s Time People Got Fired for Hiring IBM. The rest

Kindergarten kids beat MBAs

Tom Wujek’s TED talk explores how business training limits creative thinking. (Click here if embedded video isn’t showing.) Hat tips: Rob Paterson and Screw Work

Re-examining the familiar

I reread something I wrote back in 2006 about Ellen Langer’s work on mindful learning. She makes this point:When people overlearn a task so that

Empathy and innovation

Tim Kastelle has a good post about Empathy and Innovation. I’m fond of talking about “relationships before ideas” and Tim seems to be in similar

The power of touch

I’ve long thought that a clipboard was a powerful prop. I only have to hold one and I start to feel more officious. So it’s

Willpower and its limits

Nice report on research from Scientific American: Setting your mind on a goal may be counterproductive. Instead think of the future as an open question.

Not trying too hard

Jocelyn Glei writes about What we can learn from babies. She talks about the kind of meditative state in which a particular kind of creative

More Updates

Emotional debt

Releasing the hidden costs of pent up frustrations

Aliveness

Finding the aliveness below the surface of stuck

Johnnie Moore

Inequality

I was startled and glad, to read that leading Tory thinker Dave Willetts thinks this: The evidence has become stronger and stronger that inequality matters. That gradual accretion of the

Johnnie Moore

Performance appraisal

How’s this for a bit of er… 360 degree appraisal? Staff at a Vancouver coffee house give their boss some useful feedback. Spotted by AdPulp via Darren Barefoot via Beyond

Johnnie Moore

Group size

I’ve been doing some coaching work with facilitators lately and I found myself talking about group size. The short version is that I often find groups of over five people