Jared Diamond

In a highly unified system, if you have a Bill Gates—or a receptive emperor—at the top, the system, the output, is fine, and you’re not getting the latent disadvantage of the system. From the moment, though, where at the top is not Bill Gates or an outward-looking emperor but a closed-minded emperor, then things can go downhill immediately. Because one person making a wrong decision … [ Read more ]

Jared Diamond

Many famous, successful people are at either of two extremes: Either they give nothing of themselves and they just want to know your thinking, or they want to do nothing except talk about themselves and they don’t listen.

Jared Diamond

It’s not the case that you can look for the natural size of a business. Instead, what managers can profitably do is to be aware of the advantages and disadvantages of big units, and then to be aware of a different set of advantages and disadvantages of small units, and to recognize that, at any moment, the challenge for the industry is to find what … [ Read more ]

Jared Diamond

…the more things you’re interested in and the more you learn, the richer the framework into which you can fit any new thing. So synthesis, if you do it at all, gets professionally easier with time. It’s no surprise that older people can do better at synthesis, because they’ve been learning their entire lives. It’s the opposite of, say, reasoning skills in mathematics. Synthesis increases … [ Read more ]