I saw an ad for the book "The Best Place to Work" by Friedman. There are several Friedmans and this one is Ron. He is a PhD and you can find him on Amazon but also on "Ignite80".
Sometimes, when people try to evaluate a whole school, they think about the atmosphere there. Not the air quality but the general tone that, so far, only a human being can detect. Are the people there uptight? Is everyone in a hurry? Do they seem terrified? Happy?
I can't say exactly what made me tap into the book but I am glad I did. The man has been an professor and is aware that some valuable research results are printed in academic journals but that the useful practical stuff takes a long time to get combed out, translated into everyday language and published. Friedman makes clear that he is writing about creating a satisfying, fun place to work. Doing that is not always about high pay. It is also about the actual pleasures of doing the work and interacting with the others who work there.
I have heard the saying that if you and I always agree, one of us is superfluous. A related idea is the notion that if I am not making enough mistakes, I am not trying hard enough. Friedman discusses mistakes and failures, which are not always the same thing. Thomas Edison's idea of using electricity to create light, as in a light bulb, is very important to our lives today. He is supposed to have said, while searching for a way to do that, "I haven't failed - I have discovered 10,000 ways that don't work."
Friedman explains that more corporations and organizations are trying to encourage intelligent failures and lower the fear-of-failure intensity. Some have taken the idea of a CV, a "curriculum vitae", a listing of what I have done, and change the emphasis to a FV, a failure listing. What important failures have I had? The idea is not so much failure to stop smoking or finish that dreary book as it is to persist in trying something, like making an electric light, that could be valuable but so far, isn't.
Intelligent planned experiments are a basic idea of research. The failure, or clear indication that a given idea doesn't work, is as important at the success. Psychologically and socially, we aren't as wired to celebrate failure, even important disconfirmations of ideas, as we are to dance and sing about positive results. Many professional and academic journals are biased toward positive, exciting, clearly profitable results, even though some negative experimental results, failures to support a given hypothesis, may be more valuable for progress and understanding.
