To think is to make decisions: which facts to pay attention to, how to weight and combine them, what experience and knowledge applies to them, how to mix together the facts and legal knowledge, what to respond – all are decisions. Everything that happens in a law department results from…
Some drugs are believed to boost memory (See my post of Feb. 7, 2006: 40 drugs that improve memory, including modafinil; May 30, 2006: working memory; Aug. 19, 2007 #2: α2b-adrenoceptor and yohimbine; March 2, 2008 #4: ampakines and the neurotransmitter glutamate; April 22, 2008: cogniceuticals include memory enhancement; and…
Concentrate on the task at hand. One reason is that “when forced to multitask, the overloaded brain shifts its processing from the hippocampus (responsible for memory) to the striatum (responsible for rote tasks), making it hard to learn a task or even recall what you’ve been doing once you’re done.”…
Eighteenth and nineteenth century Romanticism has been viewed as a reaction to the perceived hyper-rationality advocated by Enlightenment thinkers. For Romantics, passion and ineffable beauty, pastoral values and the soul, heart and community, all were dimensions of life appreciated mostly by art, literature and music and not to be dismissed…
One article in Julian Dibbell, ed., The Best Technology Writing 2010 (Yale Univ. 2010) at 65 (by Douglas Fox), explains clarity as essentially a thermodynamic relationship. If you double the signal-to-noise ratio in a message you quadruple the energy someone consumes to maintain the same level of accuracy of understanding.…
Many bloggers write longer posts than I do. Theirs verge on articles, mine stick to the three-paragraph maximum with a formula: state an idea clearly, give the source or back references; add further thoughts. Enforced formats force insights and clarity. The challenges of a pattern and concision appeals to many…
The undeveloped field of law department management, a field without theory, short of empirical data, unresearched and rarely even openly disputed, needs all the insights it can get. Some flashes can come from concepts and insights kidnapped from other disciplines. Many disciplines have contributed to this blog, notably economics and…
In talent mgt, Oct. 2010 at Supp. 7, a pyramid from National Training Laboratories depicts the relative effectiveness of seven ways to learn. The least effective, at the top of the pyramid, is a lecture (given a percentage of 5% but the article does not explain that number). Then comes…
At the start of many meetings meant to reach a decision, researchers have found, the attendees begin by disclosing their pre-meeting inclinations. That common practice – a straw vote, so to speak – has bad consequences. According to findings summarized in strategy + bus., Issue 60 at 160, the attendees…
If we say that the company lost the case when it slipped on a banana peel of the jury, the metaphor conveys much. A fascinating series of articles in the J. Assoc. Legal Writing Directors, Fall 2010, argue for the pervasiveness and power of metaphors. Metaphorical writing serves a decorative…