I've never been able to get my head around Google Plus. Facebook is largely where I go for not-work things, Twitter and LinkedIn for work stuff. I store my photos privately in Google +, but only because I've used Picasa for a few years. I have been known to refer to G+ as the "social … Continue reading Multiple personality disorders
Category: Management
In the year and a half in which I have been building my business, I've had many great plans that have resulted in nothing (or, at least, nothing yet). In the same period my most successful and profitable client relationships have emerged seemingly by chance. A random referral, an email out of the blue, a … Continue reading Engineering serendipity
I was chatting with a former colleague over coffee yesterday, and he was recounting how his company recently went through a business continuity exercise. When I say "exercise", I mean that his company lost power to their offices for a number of days and they had to work out what the hell to do. They're … Continue reading Crisis management
Just about 10 years ago I was working out my notice from my role at the BBC, awaiting the start of a new stage in my career consulting with a management training company. I was chatting about the new direction with an old school friend who, when she heard what I was about to do, looked … Continue reading Talking in crowds
I've had two interesting, and diametrically opposed, conversations in the past couple of weeks on the subject of trust... Yesterday I met someone who was recounting the experience of a friend working in the visual effects industry. VFX as it's known in the trade is something of a boom industry in the UK at the … Continue reading Building trust
The announcement yesterday that Google and PWC are to join forces to deliver the Google for Work services delivers another plank in a strategy that seems to be turning Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma on its head. In Christensen's oft-cited model, technology providers are often unable to respond to competitive threats because of the need to … Continue reading The inverted dilemma
I've been thinking about the ways in which media industries (and others) have been disrupted by the world of digital, and am playing around with the idea of four key stages: Pre-digital The world where things existed in analogue and physical form. Think record shops and vinyl and cassettes. Think bookshops and libraries. Think news agents and … Continue reading Four stages of digital disruption
Employee engagement is big business. Entire consulting industries are devoted to measuring and tracking the levels of engagement that are displayed by a company's staff, and implementing programmes of work to try to nudge the scores upwards. An engaged workforce is a productive workforce, so the correlations tell us. But correlations and causality are two … Continue reading Employer engagement
Work with one of my clients at the moment is focused on the use and adoption of collaborative tools - social networks within the organisation. This is a path down which I have travelled a number of times over the years, but I'm realising this time around that something is now fundamentally different. Before, questions … Continue reading What’s stopping you?
I've been asked by a client to pull together a session looking at the future of career paths and career planning towards the end of the year. It's an interesting assignment, and a theme in which I've made fairly significant experimental investments in the past few years (often to my wife's considerable consternation). Undoubtedly "working … Continue reading The future of career paths
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