Instructions

Carefully read the instruction sheet (PDF, 106 KB) and then form teams as described below. After next section of this blog post, you can see what the website currently looks like and preview different variables you will be testing today.

Teams

Team #1

1. Linding Jørgensen, Elin
2. MacFarland, Ian
3. Phan, Evie
4. Swigert, Peter
5. Tsai, Dan

Team #2

1. Agrawal, Siddharth
2. Greis, David
3. Hitchcock, Meredith
4. Li, Johnny
5. Jakobsen, Ronnie

Team #3

1. Berger, Michael
2. Fan, Christopher
3. Pérez, Ignacio
4. Puthyapurayil, Seema
5. Young, Paul

Team #4

1. Chen, Jung-Wei Jennifer
2. Friedman, Sydney
3. Gutman, Max
4. Malhotra, Ramit
5. Siddiqui, Sufia

Team #5

1. Arvizu, Pablo
2. Hess, Jonas
3. Lo, Jenny
4. Sparks, Evan

Current Look of the Website

Variables

Header Color

Header Categories

1. Recently Broadcast
2. Topics
3. Shows
4. Drama & Arts
5. History
6. Science
7. Gifts
8. Sale

Promo Banner

Products Displayed

4
8
16
24 (current)
48

For many prodigies, focus comes naturally. For the rest of us, it takes a large amount of work.  For this 15 year old chef, his focus is set on the highest attainable and yet the most difficult goal possible in his field: have the best restaurant in the world by the time he’s 19. While easier said than done, the article lays out a plan for how he might do so.  A sense of urgency stood out the most to me as the advice from other chefs emphasized patience.  On the other hand, they did not have the best restaurant at 19 years old.

Article here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/magazine/the-chef-at-15.html?rref=magazine&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Magazine&pgtype=article

A very short TED talk by  Angela Lee Duckworth who has been studying “who is successful and why.”
“One characteristic emerge as a signigficant predictor of succes – it wasn’t social intelligence, it wasn’t good looks or physical health and it wasn’t IQ.”

Although her ​​points seems a bit vague, I think that she is on to something.

This story out of the Washington Post reminded me of our discussion about collaboration. If anyone can figure out the right incentive structure here to illicit real collaboration, I think the federal government would be interested in hearing from you.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/02/06/drug-companies-have-always-been-bad-at-collaboration-thats-changing/

NPR had a piece today about whether teaching kids to be “gritty” really helps them, which really reminded me of ou recent discussions on forceful champions. Are we raising a generation of forceful champions, or stubborn Henry Fords?

During the discussion on constructive fighting last class an example that popped into my mind is the ongoing fight over the Affordable Care Act as an example of things going wrong. Since it was enacted the law has been fought with many attempts to repeal it or defund it in congress, and attempts by some states to keep it form being implemented well. The latest example of this is laws being enacted to prevent prevent non-profit groups from spreading information about the law.

The ongoing fights result from the way Congress is built. Regular elections mean that even after a law is passed a party that opposed it has an interest in making it fail to prove they were right. This means that if the ACA turns out to be a failure it will be unclear if it failed because it is a bad law or because of all the effort that has gone into undermining it.

Obviously, these issues come at least in part from democracy, which has many other benefits. But it’s an interesting case in how the structure of an organization can create ongoing conflict and prevent ideas from being implemented as effectively as possible. How can an organization prevent proponents of competing ideas undermine ideas as they’re implemented? At Reckitt Benckiser they did not tolerate questioning a decision after the fact and created a culture of uniting after the fight.

Expanding a bit more on what I mentioned in class last week about how “forceful leadership” in one direction can lead to single-minded tunnel vision…Nintendo did well last generation by pretty much grabbing up all the casual gamer audience, but now as smartphones and free-to-play games are expanding exponentially, they’re in some serious trouble unless they can change something.

Nintendo Chief: ‘We Failed’

3 Ways Nintendo Can Save Mario From Certain Death

For me, who’s been a Nintendo fan since way back when, it hurts to see stuff like this happen to them, but I do realize that they can’t keep doing the same thing forever; even last generation, when they dominated with Wii sales and DS, it was only because they were the first to really capitalize on the “casual gamer” market, before smartphones had developed well enough and were widespread enough to wrestle it. This was part of the reason they did so well, despite not moving on to more complex games, HD graphics (big deal among gamers), that Sony and Microsoft did. Now Nintendo is left playing catch up, and it’s hurting them.

Here’s an article interviewing the author of the book “the charisma myth.” I personally think she is going too far in saying that it can all be learned, but one can certainly enhance it, and especially through the 3 components of charisma she is talking about. A little glib.

New York times writes that new Galaxy 5S is all about simple. Less is more.

“Samsung must have made a New Year’s resolution to stay more focused.”