writing
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In 1990, at Cornell, a group of economists handed out coffee mugs. Half the students in a classroom got one, an ordinary mug with the university seal, worth about six dollars in the campus store. The other half got nothing. Then the economists opened a market. Sellers, name your price. Buyers, name yours. Standard theory…
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In the late nineteen sixties, a computer programmer named Melvin Conway submitted a paper to the Harvard Business Review. The editors rejected his submission. Conway subsequently published his observations in Datamation magazine in April of nineteen sixty-eight. His central thesis eventually became a foundational rule of software engineering. Conway observed that any organization attempting to…
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Gather ten strategic plans from ten different regional universities. Lay them side by side on a large conference table. The physical artifacts themselves tell a story of compliance. Look closely at the typography, the paper stock, the photography, and the core pillars. You will find an unyielding repetition. The glossy covers invariably feature a diverse…
Pragmatic Revival 