What Are You Reading? Here Are Five for the Intellectually Curious.

What makes you think your company needs a hierarchy to succeed? There's a growing body of evidence that shows that organizations with flat structures outperform those with more traditional hierarchies in most situations. Harvard blog's Tim Kastelle says that hierarchy is overrated and Gary Hamel lays out the rationale for this long-overdue argument.  

It used to be that flattery, conformity and compliments were enough to butter us up. But now, as Adam Grant writes in The Sneaky Influence Tactics You Never Saw Coming, these stealth strategies are tougher to spot.  And if you're not aware of them, you're liable to fall for them. But you can see the virus coming, and put a stop to it early on. 

The corollary to the Matthew Effect is "from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." Slate's Anne Hulbert, in Give It a Rest, Genius, lets us know what the new success books don't tell us. The bad news (I guess it's bad) is that the 10,000 hour rule of those great success books is not so easy as you might think. The books really don't do realistic justice to the grunt work they champion. Here's the more painful insight to Gladwell, Colvin, Coyle and Shenk's good. . .

 news.  

Improving education in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields is a high priority for all colleges. But in a surprising riposte from the Presidents of the University of Michigan, a biochemist, and Stanford (a computer scientist), both argue in support of the absolute necessity of the humanities and social sciences. Success in life is not just about technology and STEM, but it requires a sensibility about the world and one's place in it. The ultimate challenges are more about those liberal arts.

James Surowiecki's New Yorker blog, Gross Domestic Freebies, points out that many of the new technologies are freebies. As Surowiecki commented about the IPO, Since the company was founded, ordinary users have sent more than three hundred billion tweets. In exchange, they have paid Twitter no dollars and no cents. What's the catch? Well, as he suggests, plenty are paying, just not the users. So???

Also on Dan Erwin's site:

Listening successfully to nonverbal messages

Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle?

How to be irresistible to women

Flickrphoto: Jonbradbury