Picture the scene. We've created a multi-sheet Excel workbook, maybe with links into other workbooks, and it's used by a dozen people in our department. Gill who originally created the spreadsheet left the organisation years ago. But we've managed to keep it going, adding duplicate sheets where we weren't entirely clear how Gill's formulae and … Continue reading Data-based organisations
Category: Themes
This week I have learned: the sense of enormous relief to be found at coming towards the end of a major building project that everyone seems to know it's all about the people, but we still look to the inanimate objects for answers the simple stuff is sometimes the most valuable Next week: the bit … Continue reading Weeknote 348: Cupertino
I've run a lot of workshops. I've attended even more. There have been good, there have been bad. There have been the truly shocking. In all of my years of workshopping, the single tool that I have found to be the most useful is a simple technique for planning rather than any particular technique in … Continue reading Planning a workshop
Back in my later days at BBC Worldwide in the early 2000s, I commissioned a piece of research to look at the habits that our staff had in their use of file storage and email. The work, looking back, was relatively unusual. I brought in a social scientist to do a piece of ethnographic research … Continue reading The ubiquitous inbox
I'm currently reading Tim Harford's excellent new tome Fifty Things that made the Modern Economy. Based on his BBC Radio series, it charts ideas and objects that have created the world around us today. Some of them are obvious (the Light Bulb), some of them less so (the Billy Bookcase). In his description of the … Continue reading The middle of the journey
Picture the scene. A modern office. Open plan. A bank of eight desks, two rows of four, facing each other. Screens, laptops. Six of the eight desks are occupied. Two are empty but with coats hanging over the backs of chairs, the workplace equivalent of a towel on a sun lounger. Five of the six … Continue reading Finding the right space
Back in my days at the BBC (an increasingly distant memory - it’s nearly 13 years now since I left) I was involved in a project that created the first full-programme online streaming service. It was back in around 2001, a time before YouTube if you can imagine such a thing. The service was aimed … Continue reading The trouble with saving cost
Today would have been my grandfather Robert’s 104th birthday. It also marks four years since I leapt out into the venture that I describe as Stamp. Four years on, and what have I learned so far? Well, the first thing is that in that 48 months I’ve been able to cultivate a really diverse set … Continue reading Bertie Day 2017
What is it about corporate culture that wants to redefine anything personal as things inanimate? From Personnel to Human Resources to, now, "talent"... In a brief Twitter exchange with Simon Heath this morning it clicked for me why I have such a problem with the term. For the years that I have worked in media, … Continue reading They’re people, not talent
