Friday, April 19, 2013

Miscellaneous and Fast

The New Republic: Excel error research.
Eclecticity: A clean, well-lighted place to blog.
Wally Bock: Bosses don't get do-overs.
George Will on "The Central Park Five."
CoolTools: A multipurpose pry bar.
Mark Helprin weighs in on Benghazi.
Steven Pressfield: Stories we tell ourselves.
The polygamy shoe starts to drop.
The Telegraph: England's great pubs.
Sports Illustrated: Memories of Yankee Stadium.
Spiegel: A German family's tangled WWII history.
Emily Rhodes on reading tedious books.

1 comment:

Dan in Philly said...

I use excel ALL THE TIME and it's absurdly powerful, and absurdly easy to make a small mistake which gets amped up on steroids due to the very power of Excel.

I suggest that great thinkers everywhere read the book "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan.

MBA classes all focus on thinking great thoughts and guiding through the incredible complex world of international business, but sorely lacking is the kind of technical training required by those who actually do the work.

It's like the situation you find frequently in small professional offices. A clerk with only moderate bookkeeping skills finds that the job has slowly grown too large and they are doing more accounting and finance work for which they have not been trained. It's just a recipe for failure.

In a similar way office workers who must record and analyze increasingly complex data can find their jobs outpace their skills, and frequently errors which can be easily checked and prevented go unchecked and unprevented, simply because those who use the software are not trained and equipped properly.