Our Friends' Condo for Sale: 2016 Main

A friend of mine has a lovely condo for sale in Midtown Houston. (My husband and I LOVE living in central Houston--we're in the Museum District). Anyway here's a snap shot and the links she mentions are... 

• Midtown Houston: https://midtownhouston.com/ 
• Plans for the Pierce Elevated Park: http://pierceelevatedpark.com/. 
• The Landscape Performance Series on Bagby Street: https://www.landscapeperformance.org/case-study-briefs/bagby-street-reconstruction

A Better Way to Think about Technology and the Future

In working with other people, I find they often expect I know how to make something, prefer I knew how to make it, or wish I would make it so they don't have to do so themselves. That's the burden of living in a world full of technology. The following rant from Ursula LeGuin was about her status as a "science fiction" writer being questioned.  Who cares? I think science fiction writers help us envision a future. And technology often gets in the way.

UrsulaK.LeGuin.com: A Rant About “Technology”, 2005 by Ursula K. LeGuin

Anybody who ever lighted a fire without matches has probably gained some proper respect for “low” or “primitive” or “simple” technologies; anybody who ever lighted a fire with matches should have the wits to respect that notable hi-tech invention.

I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either. I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.

And all science fiction is, in one way or another, technological. Even when it’s written by people who don’t know what the word means.

Noah Brier at BrXnd Dispatch: Human Creativity magnified by AI

What if you could magnify your creativity?

...the biggest untapped source of data lives in the heads of the world's experts. While one path people fear has AI hooking us all up to Matrix-style brain straws, what’s actually happening is that those experts who are finding ways to combine their knowledge with the power of these models are getting enormous leverage.

Does this mean AI can produce highly creative output? Of course, it does. Is it easy? No. Will it ever be easy? I have no idea. Will this mean fewer jobs for creatives in the future? It could, for sure. Are all these reasonable questions? Absolutely. It seems clear to me that these models allow particularly talented people to amplify their output by 10 or 20 times.

via newsletter.brxnd.ai

Why I like Tyler, even if I seldom understand him

Politics is stupider and less ethical than before, including when it comes immigration (but not only!  Fellow citizens also have become more negative about other fellow citizens of differing views, and I view negativism as the root of the problem all around).

via marginalrevolution.com

How culture drives strategy

All my career, I've observed culture driving strategy, and now someone has EXPLAINED!

Harvard Business Review: Build a Corporate Culture that Works, 2024-July/August by Erin Meyer

Ever since Peter Drucker famously declared that “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” there has been a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that guides employee behavior. Which raises the question: If culture eats strategy for breakfast, how should you be cooking it?

I have been studying culture in organizations in my roles as a professor and as an adviser to businesses for the past 20 years. I have looked at companies that have struggled to build cultures that shape the behavior of their employees—and at a few that seem to have cracked the code. In this article I draw on that experience to offer six simple guidelines to help managers who are confronting the challenges of culture building.