by david allan van nostrand | Feb 22, 2021 | Human Behavior, Organizational Behavior, The Myopia of Experts
Governor-general and city builder Grigory Potemkin built fake villages along the banks of the Dneiper River to impress Russian Empress Catherine the Great during her journey to Crimea in 1787. The structures would be secretly disassembled after she passed and...
by david allan van nostrand | Oct 5, 2020 | The Myopia of Experts, Unintended Consequences
Asymmetry is when two sides of a thing are out of whack, like the male Fiddler Crab’s pincers. They eat with the tiny one and use the big one to wave at females. There are two types of imbalance we hear about among humans. The most obvious one is that most of us...
by david allan van nostrand | Sep 14, 2020 | How to tell good research from bad, Items in the News, The Myopia of Experts, Using Information
Andy Devine was a college football player who moonlighted as a professional footballer, using an alias (Jeremiah Schwartz) in order to maintain his amateur status. His father operated a hotel and his mother was the granddaughter of the first Navy officer killed in the...
by david allan van nostrand | Jul 20, 2020 | Organizational Behavior, Research, Surveys, The Myopia of Experts
A guild was an association of craftsmen or merchants formed for the furtherance of their professional interests. Guilds began in ancient Rome and came to prominence in the Middle Ages. Operating at the city level, they were organized by profession, such as carpenter...
by david allan van nostrand | Apr 6, 2020 | Leadership, Outsiders, The Myopia of Experts
Every management strategy is a best guess, never perfectly clear or fully confident. Every best guess benefits from insights that challenge, confirm, or contradict existing beliefs. I share the conviction of those who believe one of the key functions of research is to...
by david allan van nostrand | Mar 30, 2020 | Shoot the messenger, The Myopia of Experts
One of the joys that came my way from serving many years in the research trenches around the world was having a front row seat to history. In hundreds of investigations of all sizes and shapes, I got to see up close how decisions got made and how things evolved over...
