The Gordian Knot—If You Cannot Solve it, Cut it

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it".

If You Cannot Solve The Problem, Change It! Techniques For Effective Problem Design

Clients often turn to consultants for assistance with problems that are complex or seemingly unsolvable. In our experience, however, we find that in many cases, much of the difficulty comes from the way the problems are framed. In this article, we offer some specific techniques for not just finding problems, but for proactively designing them to be more actionable and solvable in the first plac...

You Wrote It; You Own It!

Authors of papers published in Rockefeller University Press journals (The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, or The Journal of General Physiology) now retain copyright to their published work. This permits authors to reuse their own work in any way, as long as they attribute it to the original publication. Third parties may use our published materials under a Creativ...

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

Start of the lab: 2006 Size of the lab: Currently ten—size has fluctuated between five and 20 Research field: Systems and synthetic biology In 2005, I was working in the bioinformatics group of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont. The company was downsizing its research and development effort. At the same time, synthetic biology was emerging as a new discipline, and I wanted t...

Survey Measurement for when ‘You Know it When You See it’ and Others See it Differently

We address two long-standing problems in survey research. The first is how to measure concepts that we know how to define well only with reference to examples --freedom, political efficacy, pornography, health, etc. The normal advice methodologists give when hearing “you know it when you see it” is to tell the user to come up with a better, more precise theory, and then measurement will be stra...