Category: General

An interesting breakfast briefing run by the Bathwick Group yesterday morning looking at the subject of Cloud Computing. The topic is suitably amorphous in definition, but much of the conversation focused on Software as a Service (interestingly, few seemed that interested in the utility computing services like Amazon's EC2). One thread that allowed me to … Continue reading Getting the right people to pay…

After nine months work, the project to improve our mobile provision in the UK is at last drawing to a close. The final remaining users to be migrated were the handful of iPhone users, for whom the transition to the new BlackBerry devices was one that demonstrated a real sense of loss. Apple undoubtedly can … Continue reading Why BlackBerrys beat Apples at business (for the time being)

An interesting chat with Rico at breakfast this morning when we touched on the challenges of rationalisation and centralisation in organisations. Some of our clients are reacting to the current economy (or maybe using it as an excuse) to centralise services so that they can achieve "economies of scale". The two things that we reflected … Continue reading Diseconomies of scale

A couple of years ago, I spent a couple of years helping people to become better leaders, managers and consultants. During that time I was able to pick up such a vast repertoire of tools and techniques that it sometimes surprises me how much stuck with me. (The crappy hours and frequent trips to dull … Continue reading The power of perspectives

I lost 30 minutes of my life this week, dealing with a series of emails from a Chinese company trying to get us to believe that some of our intellectual property was under threat (in this instance, some of our domain names). Whilst it looked immediately obvious to be hokum to me, explaining why proved … Continue reading Spotting a Scam

I had a bit of a "Dur!" moment last night. You know, one of those points at which something that should have been so blindingly obvious suddenly snaps into place? I had a long-standing engagement with the Richmond, Kew and Chiswick Friends of Beer Society, and was catching up with a couple of mates from … Continue reading Can Google help but be evil?

There used to be a fairly simple rule for me. Facebook was for social social networking, and LinkedIn was for work social networking. I had realised that, whilst I tend to be a fairly open person at work, I needed to provide some sort of segmentation to my online personae if nothing else to be … Continue reading Work/Life Balance

I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Social Networking is the purest example so far of Marshall McLuhan’s statement about the medium being the message. Social networking seems to offer the ability to use a consistent distribution mechanism (the Internet) to offer varying forms of media channel (the Web2.0 fashionable service du jour) where the … Continue reading The Social Networking Medium is the Message…

TFL has recently spent a great deal of money making improvements to the layout of the pavements at the bottom of my road. What were cracked and shabby slabs and sheets of tarmac have now been split into a narrow, bricked pedestrian track, a neatly marked cycle lane and a broad expanse of top soil … Continue reading Cycling towards stupidity…

Interesting article from Euan Semple about the reaction of a (non-)participant at a recent workshop. Maybe what he was observing was a terrible symptom of our modern world... ..there again, it might just have been someone terrified of talking in workshop groups. I spent a couple of years running management development workshops, and I vividly … Continue reading Speaking out in the crowd