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I recently read a positive review of a book called Severance by Pulitzer Prize winner, Robert Owen Butler. The book is a collection of very short stories in the voice of famous and not so famous people who have been decapitated. An interesting subject.

When I was in 10th grade, I wrote an essay about the head of a freshly guillotined Frenchman. I wrote it in the first person. I don’t remember a very favorable reaction when I read the story aloud. It wasn’t as bad, though, as when I was kicked out of a Dungeons and Dragons game by a tableful of dorks for not understanding how to play.

I remember watching the video of Nicholas Berg’s beheading early in the Iraq war. It was awful — as you would expect. When I described it to my friend, he started retching and nearly had to pull the car over with a bad case of the dry heaves. As far as decapitation goes, the only blessing I think is that your blood pressure goes to zero almost immediately and therefore you lose consciousness. So I really cannot believe that someone whose entire blood supply exits their brain almost instantly is aware (as the folklore would have you believe) for any length of time. The book is worth reading nontheless.

Speaking of severance, I attended the farewell party of a close colleague yesterday. Actually I left the company a while ago but yesterday was this person’s last day. It was a very nice party and it was good to see so many people come out to say so long.

I am working on a couple of essays right now. One is called “Seduced by the Left Side,” about the temptation to overuse quantitative analytics in decision making — something I gave in to many times. The other is calle “The Pen, the Pricetag, and the Flashlight,” about managing complex businesses where rigid hierarchy has been replaced by fluid networks and marketplace-like behavior. I will post them when they are done.

Category : Books, Stuff, Work