As an innovation, the bicycle was a stepping stone that helped human capital move onward to other inventions like the airplane, the auto and better roads.…
Charisma or Glamour Power?
Jackie Kennedy had glamour while Eleanor Roosevelt had charisma. In her blog and soon to be published book, Bloomberg View writer Virginia Postrel describes the difference: Or, as she explains, “…
Entrepreneurs: How Does Steve Jobs Compare To Tim Cook?
Listening to Apple’s earnings call 2 days ago, I wondered how to compare Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, to Steve Jobs. Citing Apple’s plunging stock price (see below), some analysts are sayi…
Labor Productivity: Designing Offices
How can my boss affect my productivity? At Pixar, the restrooms are where Steve Jobs wanted them to be. Because they were located near a huge central atrium, they helped to generate a collaborative co…
The iPhone 5 Map App
While Apple’s iPhone 5 map app might not always take us where we want to go, it will probably provide a path to some surprising innovation. A little history first… The iPhone 4 was release…
What Spaghetti Sauce Teaches Us
Henry Ford once said that: “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’ ” Similarly, asked about spaghetti sauce during the…
Economic Disagreement
Astronomy might help us understand US history according to biographer Walter Isaacson. We just need to think about binary systems in which 2 separately orbiting stars “are linked because of thei…
A Macintosh with a Byte
Did you ever wonder who created the trash can icon on your computer? It came from a designer working on the first Macintosh. The year was 1981. No one really knew what a computer should look like and …
The Apple I and the iPad
Steve Jobs had been pruning Gravenstein apple trees at the All One Farm and was on one of his “fruitarian diets” when he and Steve Wozniak tried to figure out a name for their new firm. Re…
Encouraging Innovation
“Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture.” The Steve is Steve Jobs and the building is Pixar’s headquarters. (The quote came from…