It's about creating serendipity by throwing out a desire to eat out, watch a movie, get a drink, or exercise, and then making it easy to create conversations around those desires.
So don't rule out serendipity.
For Mr. Zemeckis, the great drawback to the technique is that serendipity goes out the window.
It takes time to get a book from New Jersey into Manhattan, and if a researcher has to wait a day or two to see a new text some of the serendipity goes out of research.
Of my dating horror stories that I've chosen to recount here, only one of them began online, but each man was turned off to serendipity, clicking out of whatever we could have had going and moving on to fill his shopping cart with superior merchandise.
And magazine buyers tend to enjoy the serendipity of stumbling upon something that turns out to be fascinating.
Remember how a Walkman would sometimes eat a cassette tape, as if to say, "Enough already with Loggins & Messina!" But in other ways, we are stuck in pause, still listening to glorious Pavarotti but also blocking out the aural serendipity of our existence — the chance conversations, the songbird trills, even the bleats of car horns.
Serendipity, it seems, worked out better than the best laid plans.
The discovery was "some serendipity and some working out," Lackner said.
That short-term thinking scuppered the giant firm's best chance for reinventing itself.Peter Drucker, an eminent management guru, argued decades ago that innovation and entrepreneurship are "purposeful tasks that can be organised are in need of being organised" and should be treated as part of an executive's job.Is there a risk that with too many rules, firms could lose out to serendipity?
