On the long drive down the A303 to Somerset yesterday morning, I caught a show on Radio 4 that was exploring the concept of "over parenting". It was an interesting listen, and one thing in particular has been bouncing around my head since, a metaphor for describing two different styles of parenting: the carpenter or … Continue reading Carpentry vs Gardening
Category: Management
I've never been a big fan of the associations of the concept of "Shadow IT". It's been often portrayed as a bad thing, the result of a Corporate IT department that has lost control. Somehow that those pursuing alternatives to the mandated corporate systems are somehow furtively trying to undermine the power of authority. Ever … Continue reading Shadowless IT
People are getting overloaded with meetings. There's no two ways about it. A combination of the lack of informal conversations in office environments plus the ease of organising meetings with online diaries multiplied by there no longer being the limiting factor of "no meeting room available" means that for many of us there is no … Continue reading Back to back
In the course of my research for Who Shares Wins, I was told the possibly apocryphal story of how email was introduced into a law firm back in the early 1990s. The senior partners had been sceptical about this new-fangled communications medium, and had resisted its introduction. However a more tech-friendly group of employees started … Continue reading Let them play
As a part of my current mini side project #NotAWebinar I was watching a clip from the psychologist and former NBA star John Amaechi. In it he talked about how behaviours that would be otherwise unacceptable in modern life are tolerated if not positively encouraged in the world of sport. He talked of a hypothetical … Continue reading Management by decree
Every so often, the polarity of the Earth's magnetic field switches. Geomagnetic reversal is a phenomenon that seems to happen at random, and has been observed through a natural records as having occurred 183 times in the last 83 million years. In the "list of stuff that I would worry about (but not unduly) at … Continue reading The world turned upside down?
It's difficult to make sense of the current wave of panic that is sweeping over the nation as concerns about the Coronavirus strike at the heart of all sorts of things, even if COVID19 itself is curiously absent. Get mildly freaked out and carry on appears to be the order of the day. As businesses … Continue reading The homeworking pandemic
Last week I had the pleasure of catching up with a former colleague G. He and I, some twenty one years ago, were involved in a project that delivered the very first Data Warehouse into the BBC. It was a project that had oversight from John Birt, the then Director General, and a manager with … Continue reading A decade of bad IT?
For the past couple of decades, I've found myself, for one reason or another, in front of groups of people asking them to identify brands that, for them, sum up really great or really bad customer service. In the latter category, the types of brands have remained remarkably stable, even if some of the names … Continue reading Mind the Pizza Gap
Maybe it's just the undue influence of De La Soul in my youth, but there's something about the Rule of Three that I find compelling. Ideas that come in threes just seem... right(er). I've been thinking very hard in the last few weeks about how to bring together an approach that can take us into … Continue reading Technology, change and the rule of three
