Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win
by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin · 19 Oct 2015 · 300pp · 85,043 words
VI, want to be part of a winning team. Yet, they often don’t know how, or simply need motivation and encouragement. Teams need a forcing function to get the different members working together to accomplish the mission and that is what leadership is all about. Once a culture of Extreme Ownership
Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow · 8 Sep 2014 · 278pp · 70,416 words
processor!” Apple simply said, “1,000 songs in your pocket.” Constraints like that in Jane Chen’s “Design for Extreme Affordability” challenge are often the forcing functions that lead to breakthrough innovation. No one had thought to create a radically simple incubator because no one had been tasked with making one for
Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone · 10 May 2021 · 569pp · 156,139 words
the form of six-page Amazon-style narratives, subject to Bezos’s careful reading and detailed questions. It was a Bezos-style repeatable process, or forcing function, designed to push his team to think creatively and innovate. Post execs said that Bezos read every memo beforehand save for once, when he apologized
The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future
by Jeff Booth · 14 Jan 2020 · 180pp · 55,805 words
valuable but because of abundance fall in price precipitously. In a world where technology is concurrently driving deflation and abundance, maybe eventually, one of the forcing functions that makes cooperation more likely to stick is the very fact that there will not be a large economic incentive to “cheat” or “betray”—abundance
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · 20 Jan 2014 · 339pp · 88,732 words
Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab to talk about exactly the topics in which we were most interested. We had truly cross-disciplinary conversations without any forcing function other than our own curiosities, which have remained strong enough to resist the countless hectoring demands of academic life. As these lunches indicate, MIT itself
Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth
by Andrew Smith · 3 Apr 2006 · 409pp · 138,088 words
, or you didn’t survive. And so there was a very, very strong selection process. And human beings have probably had a much faster evolutionary forcing function than people realize.” We pass through money and families and end up at Schmitt the scientist’s different take on the divorces, with him pointing
Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman · 22 Nov 2016 · 602pp · 177,874 words
and Planet Earth, mankind has become large enough in numbers and empowered enough by the supernova to be both a force of nature and a forcing function on nature. Our actions today, more than ever before, can turn the rain on and turn the rain off—literally. Climate change means more extremes
On Thermonuclear War
by Herman Kahn · 16 Jul 2007 · 1,117pp · 270,127 words
of our plans. Much of our force may not get the order to go ahead. In addition, because we cannot predict which part of the force functions properly, there will be target misallocations. If, for example, our offensive force is assigned a large target system so that it is spread thinly, and
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein · 7 Apr 2008 · 304pp · 22,886 words
all) no longer allow this error because you get your card back immediately. Another strategy, suggested by Norman, is to use what he calls a “forcing function,” meaning that in order to get what you want, you have to do something else first. So if in order to get your cash, you
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, plans (college savings accounts) flexible spending accounts follow through failure to, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) food display food selection footnotes, uses of forced choice forcing function Ford, Harrison (k) plans framing France, organ donations in Franklin, Benjamin freedom of choice, danger of overreaching, elimination of, Just Maximize Choices, opposition to, and
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
by Atul Gawande · 2 Jan 2009 · 182pp · 56,961 words
maintain sterility in the second, and to be prepared for cardiac bypass in the third. All were amenable, as a result, to what engineers call “forcing functions”: relatively straightforward solutions that force the necessary behavior—solutions like checklists. We are besieged by simple problems. In medicine, these are the failures to don
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for the care of ICU patients. It requires multiple practitioners orchestrating different combinations of tasks for different conditions—matters that cannot be controlled by simple forcing functions. Plus, people are individual in ways that rockets are not—they are complex. No two pneumonia patients are identical. Even with the same bacteria, the
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critical step the tradesmen were expected to follow and when—which is logical if you’re confronted with simple and routine problems; you want the forcing function. But the list on O’Sullivan’s other wall revealed an entirely different philosophy about power and what should happen to it when you’re
Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss · 6 Dec 2016 · 669pp · 210,153 words
question. After reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, I decided that extreme questions were the forcing function I needed. The question I found most helpful was, “If I could only work 2 hours per week on my business, what would I do
The Year Without Pants: Wordpress.com and the Future of Work
by Scott Berkun · 9 Sep 2013 · 361pp · 76,849 words
imagine a compellingly simple explanation for customers, then you don't really understand why the feature is worth building. Writing the announcement first is a forcing function. You're forced to question if your idea is more exciting for you as the maker than it will be for your customer. If it
The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy, and Our Health--And How We Must Adapt
by Sinan Aral · 14 Sep 2020 · 475pp · 134,707 words
hormone cortisol in monkeys, pigs, and humans; and increases oxidative stress in rabbits and people. The neural pain of loneliness is, in some sense, a forcing function encouraging these species to be social. Human loneliness is similar. John Cacioppo at the University of Chicago had been arguing for years that loneliness persists
How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight
by Julian Guthrie · 19 Sep 2016
technology available which helps humans in achieving difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible feats, this technology is a forcing function which helps to focus the whole of human ingenuity at the same well articulated goal. . . . This concept, the forcing function, this technology, is the competitive “Prize.” Not prizes for spelling bees or prizes for a lifetime
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technology available which helps humans in achieving difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible feats, this technology is a forcing function which helps to focus the whole of human ingenuity at the same well articulated goal. . . . This concept, the forcing function, this technology, is the competitive “Prize.” Not prizes for spelling bees or prizes for a lifetime
How Money Became Dangerous
by Christopher Varelas · 15 Oct 2019 · 477pp · 144,329 words
Michael Milken had possibly done more to revamp American business for the better than anyone by introducing a way to go after underperforming management. This forcing function—management being held accountable for profits—would make America competitive in the 1990s and beyond. Milken’s junk bonds later provided the financial vehicle for
Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann · 17 Jun 2019
publicize these causes. In Chapter 3 we described how commitment can help you overcome present bias; it can also serve as a great catalyst, or forcing function, to reach the activation energy required for a personal or organizational change. It usually takes the form of a prescheduled event, or function, that facilitates
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, or forces, you to take a desired action. A common example of a forcing function is the standing meeting, such as one-on-one meetings with a manager or coach, or a regular team meeting. These are set times, built
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into the calendar, when you can repeatedly bring up topics that can lead to change. You can similarly build additional forcing functions directly into your personal or company culture. For instance, you can set the expectation of producing weekly project updates, which serve as catalysts to think
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critically about project status and communicate progress to stakeholders. A more personal forcing function would be a regular appointment with a trainer at a gym, or a weekly family meeting or budget review. These set blocks of time will
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of potential energy. When enacting change, think deeply about how to reach critical mass and how you will navigate the technology adoption life cycle. Use forcing functions to grease the wheels for change. Actively cultivate your luck surface area and put in work needed to not be subsumed by entropy. When faced
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diplomacy, because using a game-theory lens means you must think about how other players will move and react to your moves, which is a forcing function (see Chapter 4) to empathize with their goals and motivations. And through this same process you might also better clarify your own goals and motivations
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way to do this is through a weekly one-on-one standing meeting with a manager, mentor, or coach. This meeting can serve as a forcing function to deliver such feedback on a regular basis (as we noted in Chapter 4). These can be relatively unstructured meetings where you discuss current projects
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theory, 234 flywheel, 108–10, 112, 283 Food and Drug Administration, U.S., 283 football, 226, 243 foot-in-the-door technique, 216 Forbes, 220 forcing function, 113, 244 forecasts, see predictions and forecasts Fortune 100 companies, 122 Foundation, 5 401(k) programs, 87–88 foxes versus hedgehogs, 254–55 frame of
Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition
by Michael Collins and Charles A. Lindbergh · 15 Apr 2019
computer and trajectory gnomes. Borman at the same press conference hit upon another vital point, namely that Apollo 8 was acting as a catalyst, a forcing function, to clear all closets of skeletons, to force people to state their doubts about going so far from home, and to cause the moon to
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson · 11 Sep 2023 · 562pp · 201,502 words
them round off into days or even hours. Every second counted. “We need to get to Mars before I die,” he said. “There’s no forcing function for getting us to Mars other than us, and sometimes that means me.” The surge was successful. In just over ten days, the booster and
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by Scott Rosenberg · 2 Jan 2006 · 394pp · 118,929 words
for the San Jose Mercury News, pushed him to go public, he resisted at first and then decided it would be a good thing, a “forcing function” to get OSAF in gear and resolve some of the lingering uncertainties surrounding the project. Like the product’s name. The software industry has a
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sketching what this view would contain and show, and what it wouldn’t, became a focal point for decisions—what Kapor liked to call a forcing function. The job of creating the detail view, turning those choices into a functioning piece of code, fell on the shoulders of OSAF’s newest programmer
Ethics of Big Data: Balancing Risk and Innovation
by Kord Davis and Doug Patterson · 30 Dec 2011 · 98pp · 25,753 words
much data. One of the implications of amassing this much information, especially about people and their behaviors, is what I’m calling big data’s “forcing function.” It is pushing us—whether we like it or not—to consider serious ethical issues including whether certain uses of big data violate fundamental civil
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being used to improve insights into effective education policies and to improve our ability to predict dangerous weather conditions in microclimate-sized geographies. But the forcing function big data creates raises questions about data handling with a new urgency. These challenges are potentially troubling because they often extend beyond the management controls
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piece of our economy and society works had the potential to significantly limit our collective ability to benefit from those tools. As big data’s forcing function drives data further into our organizations and individual lives, balancing risk and innovation will continue to be an urgent need that must be met in
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framework for facilitating ethical discussions in business environments designed to expose those values and help organizations take actions that align with them. The big-data forcing function is bringing business functions and individual values into greater contact with each other. Big data is pushing corporate action further and more fully into individual
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examples. Historically, business has been more about the development of strategic plans for action and optimizing the execution of those plans to create profit. The forcing function of big data is expanding the ethical impact of our business operations further into the personal lives of its employees and customers. It is a
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a request, and the question of whether we should change the law would be moot. And this is just one small example: the big-data forcing function extends business operations into the nooks and crannies of our lives in ways we have yet to discover. In the 23 years between the VPPA
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or perfectly anonymous, but never both” (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006). The broader implication is that as big data’s forcing function grows larger and more powerful, more and more information may slip into the category of “personally identifying” in practice. If this is true, it means
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a basic understanding of whether actions and business practices are aligned with values by first exploring exactly what those values are. Because big data’s forcing function interacts with a broad spectrum of your customers’ lives, the subsequent range of values it can influence is equally broad, and it can be hard
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and maintaining that balance is impossible without first understanding, explicitly and authentically, what values are in play. And the broad influence of big data’s forcing function is widening the scope of inquiry every day. Analysis The goal of ethical inquiry is to develop an understanding of organizational values. The next step
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operations and values in a consistent and coherent way. Big data is one of, if not the, most influential technological advancement in our lifetime. The forcing function big data exerts on our individual and collective lives extends, and will continue to expand, into ever more personal and broadly influential aspects of society
Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
by Kathryn Schulz · 7 Jun 2010 · 486pp · 148,485 words
more impartial and therefore (one might imagine) far more palatable source of feedback. These red flags in our environment are, in essence, a kind of forcing function—the engineer’s term of art for features of the physical world that alert us to the fact that we are making a mistake. If
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’s black Ford F–150, the key will not turn in the lock—one of a great many car-related forcing functions that have long been standard protocol in the automotive industry. Forcing functions are, on the whole, quite effective. But they can’t stop you from, say, jiggling your key in the lock
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would have had to acknowledge at least some degree of error after the Great Disappointment—the continued existence of the planet being, after all, the forcing function par excellence. But no: displaying their powers of imagination and defying our own, the truly diehard among the Millerites declined to admit that they had
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institution in Ypsilanti, Michigan, all of whom believe themselves to be Jesus. I am grateful to Howard Katz for suggesting that I read it. Forcing function. I learned about forcing function (and borrowed the example of the key in the lock) from Donald A. Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (Basic Books, 2002
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. See ’Cuz It’s True Constraint flashbulb memories, 72–74, 74n, 75, 355n flip-flopping, 175, 175n, 285 follow-the-crowd logic, 138–39, 139n forcing functions, 193–94 forgetting curve, 73 Foucault, Michel, 38, 294, 337 fractal wrongness, 210n Francis, John, 310–11 Frankish, Keith, 369n Franklin, Benjamin, ix, 5–6
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error, 183–200 abrupt belief changes, 186–87 Anita Wilson and, 189–92, 195, 196 attitude toward, 197–200 first person present tense, 18, 184 forcing functions and, 193–94 gradual belief changes, 184–86 sunk costs and, 194–96 Montaigne, Michel de, 33, 142 morality (moral issues), 13–15, 232 Morse
Engineering Security
by Peter Gutmann
following complex rituals by applying software-based validation checks and following fixed protocols for which the default action is the safe one, using constraints and forcing functions to guide users to the appropriate action and structuring critical tasks in such a way that errors are avoided, avoiding excessive reliance on user vigilance
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the words of one of the originators of PSMs, they represent “an organised version of doing purposeful ‘thinking’” [87]. What PSMs do is act as forcing functions for designs, making you consider all manner of environmental factors before you begin and only allowing you to decide on concrete solutions towards the end
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take real effort. The technical term for this type of mechanism, which prevents (or at least makes unlikely) some type of mistake, is a forcing function [150]. Forcing functions are used in a wide variety of applications to dissuade users from taking unwise steps. For example the programming language Oberon requires that users who
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unsavoury things are taking place here and that this is something that you may want to avoid contact with. Another example of a security-related forcing function occurs in the MySQL database replication system, which has a master server controlling several networked slave machines. The replication system user starts the slave with
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their 496 Usability applications, having a less intrusive UAC would have been somewhat self-defeating for one of its intended goals. Without this type of forcing function it can take years before even the simplest security fixes get adopted. For example a study in mid 2010 found that two core Windows security
Designing the Mind: The Principles of Psychitecture
by Designing The Mind and Ryan A Bush · 10 Jan 2021
streaming show. Over time, the token will become so closely associated with the reward that it will serve as a powerful reward itself.36 A forcing function is a self-imposed circumstance which “forces” you to execute behaviors which would otherwise be difficult or impossible. When you pre-commit to a certain
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level of proficiency that you would get in a university education would be incredibly difficult, simply because free courses don’t serve as a significant forcing function. In school courses, you have a financial investment, the respect of your peers and professors, grades, and degrees on the line, and these motives will
The Market for Force: The Consequences of Privatizing Security
by Deborah D. Avant · 17 Oct 2010 · 872pp · 135,196 words
effectiveness 59, 61, 62, 136, 139–40, 224–25 in Sierra Leone 114–96 in Croatia 110 in the US 138 see also control of force, functional control; reinforcing process of control Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) 234, 235 Military Professional Resources International (MPRI, now part of L-3 Communications) 9, 18
Shipping Greatness
by Chris Vander Mey · 23 Aug 2012 · 231pp · 71,248 words
much work you have to do is crazy. Of course it is! But for all you know, there might be a contractual deadline or another forcing function driving that date, so at the very least try to prune the bias out of your questions. There’s only upside for you if you
Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website
by Matt Blumberg · 13 Aug 2013 · 561pp · 114,843 words
class in college, how many papers would you have written if your professor hadn’t assigned them and given them due dates? The Board as Forcing Function A board can help you run your organization by creating a cadence of regular, recurring deadlines. Unless you’re in a business that has significant
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by a certain date, you raise the bar and remove much of the arbitrariness from the decision. You can also use the board as a forcing function for quality. Sure, a CEO of a small company can read someone’s scribbled bullet points or a half-baked spreadsheet. However, if you are
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that, you will want to note all of those dates in advance. Vacations. Critical to plan these out early, even if there’s no natural forcing function like kids’ school calendars to align to. If you don’t map them out and keep the dates clear, you will never take time off
Real World Haskell
by Bryan O'Sullivan, John Goerzen, Donald Stewart and Donald Bruce Stewart · 2 Dec 2008 · 1,065pp · 229,099 words
list remains unevaluated. In other words, we do almost no useful work in parallel: our sillySort is nearly completely sequential. We avoid this with our force function by forcing the entire spine of a list to be evaluated before we give back a constructor: -- file: ch24/Sorting.hs force :: [a] -> () force xs
The Joy of Clojure
by Michael Fogus and Chris Houser · 28 Nov 2010 · 706pp · 120,784 words
are Clojure’s delay and force. In short, the delay macro is used to defer the evaluation of an expression until explicitly forced using the force function. Using these laziness primitives, we can wrap an expression in a call to delay and use it only if necessary on the callee’s side
Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris · 30 Jun 1988 · 661pp · 169,298 words
links between the electromagnetic and the weak nuclear forces. Indicates that in the high energies that characterized the very early universe, electromagnetism and the weak force functioned as a single, electroweak force. Also known as the Weinberg-Salam theory. Ellipse. A plane curve in which the sum of the distances of each
The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler · 28 Jan 2020 · 501pp · 114,888 words
these is a by-product of converging exponentials, a “second order effect” in the technical parlance, that acts as an additional innovation accelerant. While each force functions independently, their real effect is combinatory. Think of them as steps in a mathematical equation, an algorithm designed (in a sense by all of us
Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff and Niall Richard Murphy · 15 Apr 2016 · 719pp · 181,090 words
a major driver in prioritizing work for SREs and product developers, because they reflect what users care about. A good SLO is a helpful, legitimate forcing function for a development team. But a poorly thought-out SLO can result in wasted work if a team uses heroic efforts to meet an overly
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon
by Colin Bryar and Bill Carr · 9 Feb 2021 · 302pp · 100,493 words
on. Written narratives will convey our ideas in a deeper, stronger, more capable fashion while adding a key additional benefit: they will act as a forcing function that shapes sharper, more complete analysis. Six-page narratives are also incredibly inclusive communication, precisely because the interaction between the presenter and audience is zero
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let graphics predominate. Q: Six pages feels short. How much can we fit onto a page? A: The six-page limit acts as a valuable forcing function that ensures we only discuss the most important issues. We also set aside 20 minutes for reading and expect that every attendee can read the
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—leaving those for the group. However, restricting the length of the document is, to use a term that came up when describing the narratives, a forcing function—we have seen that it develops better thinkers and communicators. The creation of the PR/FAQ starts with the person who originated either the idea
Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then
by David William Plummer · 14 Sep 2021
overlooked, not because I wanted attention upon myself, but to direct adequate attention on problem X. In this way, my behavior was acting as a forcing function to focus people on the problem. This issue of recurrence is paramount. I am not overly concerned with apologies or explanations, nor retribution or anything
API Design Patterns
by Jj Geewax · 19 Jul 2021 · 725pp · 168,262 words
only ever a single current version and a single preview version. This is a critical piece of the strategy in that it acts as a forcing function to move toward continual improvement while keeping the number of active versions to an absolute minimum. In other words, this strategy tends to see new
Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems
by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield · 29 Mar 2020 · 1,380pp · 190,710 words
reliability- or safety-improving releases out to users as fast as is reasonable. Early on, we used the Pwn2Own and later Pwnium hacking contests as forcing functions to see if we could actually release and deploy critical security fixes in under 24 hours. (We can.) This required strong partnership and a significant
Practical OCaml
by Joshua B. Smith · 30 Sep 2006
, when eager evaluation is used, an exception is raised because the argument is evaluated first. Evaluation of the lazy value is performed by the Lazy.force function. After a lazy expression is evaluated, it does not get evaluated again, even if you force it. This is convenient because multiple forces do not
Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With the Creators of Major Programming Languages
by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden · 21 Mar 2009 · 496pp · 174,084 words
whatever. When you sum it all up, it actually makes sense to do it, even from a business standpoint. It also works as a great forcing function in being very precise about what it is you’re building which has lots of advantages internally. The fact that we standardized C# meant that
Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
by Melanie Swan · 22 Jan 2014 · 271pp · 52,814 words
propositions that resonate with constituencies, shrink costs, and demonstrate effectiveness. There could be hybrid governments in the future, like other industries, where automation is the forcing function, and the best “worker” for the job is a human/algorithmic pairing.193 Perfunctory repetitive tasks are automated with blockchain registries and smart contracts, whereas
Seeking SRE: Conversations About Running Production Systems at Scale
by David N. Blank-Edelman · 16 Sep 2018
scope for this chapter), for a system component such as Envoy, I think having the developers of the system also operate it has been a forcing function toward making sure the service mesh truly lives up to the hype of creating a transparent network. In the following subsections, I briefly summarize a
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is finalized. Whether by quiet resolution via 1:1 chat, formation of a working group without semi-public pressure, or a large crisis as a forcing function, employee voice is a way of ensuring that your company’s products conform to engineering ethics. The same communication and escalation skills that keep SREs