“Decentralization" is a popular term used to bracket a set of interrelated technologies including blockchain, crypto tokens, NFTs. It’s also a fuzzy term that has been used in subtly different ways in different disciplines throughout history, so the question “what is a decentralized system", or, more to the point, “is…

A few notes on coordination, adaptation, and the role of institutions. — “Both the organization theorist Chester Barnard and the economist Friedrich Hayek took adaptation to be the main purpose of economic organization, but with differences.” — Oliver Williamson Nobel Lecture Coordination has become an increasingly important C-word in business and economics, based on the emerging realization that not all economic activity…

In 1991, social scientist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon invited us to participate in a somewhat alien-sounding thought experiment. Imagine an extraterrestrial observing human behavior with a special telescope. Instead of showing us as we are, the telescope allows the observer to recognize social structures: organizations appear as green blobs, interactions between organizations as a network of red lines between the blobs.

In 1956, the fledgling Graduate School of Industrial Administration (GSIA) at Carnegie Institute of Technology received an IBM 650 computer to use jointly with the engineering and the mathematics departments. In the coming years, this acquisition led to a number of research activities which not only produced multiple economics Nobel Prizes and Turing Awards, but also two very distinct, somewhat incompatible economic frameworks: bounded rationality and rational expectations.

One of the intriguing aspects of venture building is the contrast between two very different types of engagement: the creation of new potential opportunities and the cutting off of those opportunities that, after some probing, don’t appear viable. — The two steps of venture building These two types require two very different modes of work. In operations research they are known as “branch and bound”. Within an established company, “research” and “development” are typically two separate organizations within overall product R&D.

I was recently asked what the most obvious long-term effect of the “whiplash of 2020” was. My answer was that every social change we’d usually expect to unfold within twenty years would suddenly only take five. — In the famous technology adoption curve popularized by Geoffrey Moore, new ideas often linger for ten or more years in the segments reserved for innovators and early adopters: people enamored with technology and willing to put up with its drawbacks.

The dream to revolutionize finance via the disintermediation of big banks and banking the unbanked might be in the news today thanks to the ups and downs of cryptocurrencies and the lingering effects of the financial crisis of 2007. But the very ideas that drive our rethinking the basic concepts of credit, trust, and governance are far from new. — Just like the current discussion is driven by the accelerating pace of the information age replacing the industrial age, the mid 19th century financial innovations were the result of increasing industrialization colliding against the last vestiges of a rural, feudal society. In its midst were a group of social reformers.

The much derided devil’s ivy (epipremnum aureum) is probably not at the forefront of the public discussion about the future of work, but we might as well give the inauspicious pot plant a second look if we want to rethink the way we to work together in the future. — When you think of office plants, you probably think of the succulents your colleagues keep on their desks or the hardy perennials kept alive by the maintenance staff.