I had a fascinating chat last night with the CEO of a fairly large financial services organisation. He is in the process of assessing a few startups who are taking part in an accelerator programme. One of the startups is pushing "Blockchain", but it wasn't entirely clear for what end. There were a couple of … Continue reading A corporate guide to distributed ledgers
Category: Management
Twice today I've referred people to an article I wrote back in 2014 entitled "Is it really happening so quickly?". The gist of the piece was a retort to the often-heard claim that things these days are happening ever so much faster than they ever have done. In the article I resorted to using actual … Continue reading The Long Nose
It feels to me like attitudes towards technology are beginning to change at senior levels. There are undoubtedly a fair few senior executives who wear technological unawareness as a badge of honour in exactly the way they wouldn't if it was finance. But they are becoming rarer; most execs now understand that technology is important … Continue reading Connecting the Boardroom
There is a thought experiment that I picked up a year or so ago, and the origins are sadly forgotten. It goes a little something like this: You have found out that the world is in mortal danger. Aliens are coming. They land in 60 minutes. When they land, they will take over the planet … Continue reading The Rumsfeld Paradox
So according to extensive research published yesterday by Microsoft as part of their annual Future Decoded jamboree, digital transformation is a matter of changing people and behaviours rather than merely technology. Wow. Who knew? But here, it seems to me, is the rub. The sort of decision making in organisations that chooses Microsoft to provide … Continue reading It’s all about the people
Not for the first time, yesterday I spent some time with a potential client who had been through the digital agency selling process and had, quite frankly, been sold a Digital Pup. Digital lipstick on a pig, if you excuse my mixing of metaphors. Because these days the world of digital agencies has become one … Continue reading The Digital Pup
So it’s just about a decade now since I had my Damascene moment on Cloud computing. Whilst working at the then Reuters, one of the four main business units came to IT to tell us that not only had they purchased SalesForce, but that they also had the people to be able to implement it. … Continue reading Ten years a cloud
I spent a very pleasant Sunday with friends, one of whom runs a school for the performing arts in London. Whilst these days he doesn't teach as much as he used to (or, to some extent as much as he would like), his eyes would come alight when talking about how his role was to … Continue reading Unleashing potential
Every so often a small yet simple idea from someone else gets lodged in my brain and changes the way I think about things. So it is with the concept from Sigmund Freud that crossed my path a few months ago: the narcissism of small differences. What Freud observed was that when groups of people … Continue reading Small differences
A few years ago I read somewhere (source long since forgotten) of a definition of a game being a series of barriers that players decide voluntarily to overcome. At the time it struck me that that pretty much described much of the business of working, too. Although the volunteer nature of the pursuit may be … Continue reading Self-imposed barriers
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