Every year to accompany the Silicon Beach event, those speaking are asked to contribute to a book that is distributed to all attendees. Here's my contribution... A good friend of mine and I enjoy a heated debate. She’s an accountant with opinions. I’m a gob-shite. We both like a glass or two of red with … Continue reading Blindly Following Rules
Category: Management
Imagine a scenario... You are busy doing whatever it is that earns you your living. Your phone rings. It's from someone who might need something so important that you need to interrupt your current activity. But it might be trivial enough that you don't. You answer the phone. It's trivial. You haven't got the time … Continue reading The place of work
After many years of increasing professionalism, and the rise of complex management frameworks, the world of business technology management is now in a stat of turmoil. Put simply: nobody really these days has the first clue on how you manage information technology in a big business. It had got relatively clear. Technology was a cost … Continue reading Shifting the balance
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
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
mmitII 