At this moment in time, I don't own a suit. The era of attending weddings has passed, second marriages in my circle of friends seem to be lower-key affairs, and I've not quite reached the age when people are popping off. Weddings, christenings, funerals... It's not something I think about a huge amount. I generally … Continue reading Suited and booted
Category: Management
I saw a wonderful documentary last night about the conjuror and professional sceptic James Randi. After the first part of a career spent emulating and improving upon the work of Harry Houdini, Randi since the 70s has put much of his efforts into debunking fraudster faith healers and spiritualists (including waging a war on spoonbender … Continue reading Blind Faith
As I get older, I get increasingly to a functionalist position on the world around me. That the social structures and constructs that we see around us are there through a process of evolution and serve some sort of positive benefit because otherwise they would have fallen foul of natural selection. Sometimes this can seem … Continue reading Social evolution
You have just been informed that aliens are coming. They will take over the Earth in 60 minutes. You are the only person on the planet who knows this information. You must tell the Prime Minister. But you must tell them in a way that means that they actually take some action. What do you … Continue reading The aliens are coming!
The world of homeopathy is an interesting thing. Pseudoscience cobbled together to produce medical interventions that are no more effective than a placebo, but have some sort of efficacy as a result of that effect. If you want to create a placebo effect, then you need to tell people a story to get them to … Continue reading Homeopathic IT
On Friday I was at a presentation given by one of the big IT vendors on the subject of Big Data and analytics. During the session the story was told of how US retailer Target had got so good with predictive analytics that they had infuriated the father of a teenage girl by sending her … Continue reading The legends of Big Data
Last week I wrote about the pioneering work of the Tavistock Institute and the thinking that they provided into dealing with a world of cloud-like problems. That terminology was taken from philosopher Karl Popper's beautiful analogy of a world in which some problems are clock-like (complex, complicated, but ultimately knowable) but many of the real … Continue reading Dealing with Clouds
The dust isn't yet settled on the UK's General Election, but one element that is already getting coverage is the gap between opinion polling before the ballot, the exit poll, and what appears to be the final outcome. After weeks of pollsters predicting a result "too close to call", the exit poll published when the … Continue reading Sampling
I seem to hear the phrase Culture Change a fair bit at the moment. Increasingly I'm coming to the conclusion as it's used as a shorthand for "people change we don't know how or can't be bothered to address". Changing people's behaviours is hard. But changing culture is even harder. To be honest, I'm coming to … Continue reading Hiding behind culture
Welcome to the future of business productivity. Welcome to meetingly.io. With our CloudBigDataScienceCloud patented heuristic algorithms, meetingly.io's HRV (Human Resource Virtualisation) engine enables your staff to quadruple their productivity through meeting automation. With a simple button click integrated into Microsoft Outlook, Google Apps and all major App Platforms, meetings become meetingly.io automeetings. Schedule, click, forget. … Continue reading meetingly.io
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