Last week I read John Doerr’s Measure What Matters and Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics back-to-back. Needless to say, they did not agree. Measure What Matters is a peppy business book about the importance of setting clear goals and backing them with metrics. Acronyms and buzzwords abound. These sentences, found on page 186, might […]

I admire when other authors showcase the best evidence against their position. It’s disappointing to finish a book and find the author ignored a good, well-known rebuttal. In that spirit, I want to consider some of the best arguments I’ve heard against doing the real thing. To recap my position: Most learning occurs by doing […]

I’ve been writing about productivity for fifteen years. In that time, my life has gone through many changes. I’ve gone to university, graduated, lived abroad, built a business, written a book and gotten married. But easily the biggest shift was the birth of my son, last year. How I’ve thought about productivity has shifted dramatically. […]

We all have an intuition about what it means to understand something. We all know what it’s like to be confused. We know both the pain of memorizing an answer you don’t understand as well as the satisfaction that comes from finally “getting it.” Yet what that intuition points to is hard to pin down. […]