What I Learned from Trying to Innovate at The New York Times

John Geraci in Harvard Business Review:

The Times is a perfect example of company-as-organism. Employees at the Times rarely go offsite for lunch or meetings. When you work there, your network is inside the building. That’s where all of the action is, where the valuable information is traded, where the battles are fought, and where the victories are won. When the Core Team or the Newsroom Team or the Beta Team finds a solution, it is a Times solution. Naturally there are inputs and outputs to the company, but like an organism, these are discrete — a mouth, a nose, an ear. At the Times, the Strategy Team pursues and manages strategic relationships for the company, takes in the resources needed to stay alive, and channels those to the rest of the organism. It’s the model of the companies our fathers and mothers worked at. And it worked great for them.

But in today’s world, it doesn’t. Companies with the organism mindset are too slow to adapt to survive in the modern world. The world around them changes, recombines, evolves, and they are stuck with their same old DNA, their same old problems, their same old (failed) attempts at solutions.

The Surprising Habits Of Original Thinkers

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies "originals": thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this TED talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. "The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they're the ones who try the most," Grant says. "You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones."

Being An Expert Literally Changes How You See Things

The Washington Post:

People who are experts in things can see differences in them that most laypeople can’t. Two little black dresses that look different to fashion lovers may look nearly identical to everyone else. The same goes for birds and birdwatchers, vintage cars and car aficionados, art critics and abstract expressionist painters, and even the faces of our friends and loved ones — when we know something well, it's easier to distinguish its differences.

A fascinating study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University shows that the same principle also governs how we read and interpret language. The study finds evidence that the way we process information visually is influenced by our knowledge and experience.

Pop and Philosophy

The School of Life: Pop music and philosophy would seem, at first glance, to have little to say to one another. But in fact the latter has a lot to learn from the former.

A Neuroscientist Explains 'Why We Snap'

Melissa Dahl interviews R. Douglas Fields, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, about the reasons why we sometimes snap:

Fields argues that there are nine major triggers that invoke the rage response, which he has assembled into the acronym LIFEMORTS: life and limb, as in your physical safety; and insult, meaning a verbal threat. The next six are self-explanatory: family, environment, mate, order in society, resources, tribe — you already know each of these are things you’d fight for if you felt they were in danger. The last is stopped, the idea that any animal (humans included) will ready itself to fight if it feels restrained or trapped. So for each of these nine triggers, the rage kicks in to prepare you for a potential fight, because you feel like something essential has been threatened.

These triggers evolved in our brains for a reason, and at times they give rise to defensive action that is as necessary for modern humans as it was for our early ancestors. But they can misfire, too, sometimes to violent, irreversible effect. Fields spoke with Science of Us about what happens inside the brain when we flip our proverbial lids, and how we can begin to control this impulse.