Today's coffee companion (although we both had tea) is the UK head of business development in the public sector for one of the big US technology companies. We have both been in our roles for a similar length of time, so there was a bit of "How's the new job?" experience sharing, but mostly we … Continue reading 9th of 100
Category: Projects
Today's first coffee companion is a former Head of IT who has impeccable taste in podcasts. We talked about the strange world of utility companies and how the legacy of Hull keeping its telecoms independent of the national network has resulted in some of the fastest internet connections in Europe. We talked about how gas … Continue reading 7th of 100
Today's second companion is a former CIO who now does various bits of consulting We talked about the scourge that is Performance Management, and I once again unloaded some of the scars that were left on me in my time at Microsoft at the peak of their forced curve obsession. We talked about biodiversity as … Continue reading 8th of 100
Today's #100coffees coffee companion is a management coach who came from the world of marketing strategy. We talked about the importance of loose connections and how relationships that exist between people from different organisations are often stronger than those that exist between people within organisations - exploring a metaphor of organisations as families where just … Continue reading 6th of 100
A couple more virtual (and tea-based) coffee catch-ups today to close off the first week back at work in 2023. The first was with a colleague based in the Manchester office. We talked about how we might as an organisation introduce more Service Design and User Centred Design work into what we do with clients, … Continue reading 4th and 5th of 100
This week I have learned: about sinkholes. Well, a little bit about sinkholes. A hole opened up at the road at the other end of our street. It's a main road, and it's meant that there's been significant disruption. Buses re-routed and whatnot. The way the local authority, transport services and police have all co-ordinated … Continue reading Weeknote 614: sinkhole
And so the experiment gets properly underway. A fascinating and broad-ranging conversation with a technology architect this morning where we covered a whole load of things. Another tea and this was the first virtual (Zoom-based) session. I picked up on the Enterprise Architecture on a Page initiative (http://eaonapage.com/) which has used some proper research to … Continue reading 3rd of 100
After a bit of a flying start at the end of 2022, I'm now ready for the enormous conversational percolator that will be #100Coffees in 2023. As I alluded to in this recent post, I think that we in a hybrid working world now need to get a bit more deliberate in finding those moments … Continue reading New Year, New Beverage
Looking back on it, I was exhausted at this time last year. Partly that was because of all the stuff that I wrote about back then. But in hindsight it was also in large part because I had reached the end of the line in what I could meaningfully achieve in my last job. The … Continue reading Yearnote 2022
Yes, that's not coffee. It's jasmine tea. I said from the outset that other beverages were available. Today's beverage came after a lovely Chinese meal in Paddington. The conversation was another thriller: My companion is currently working transforming an electoral authority, running national government elections. The scaling challenges are mind-blowing- usually the authority have around … Continue reading 2nd of 100
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