Had a fascinating couple of hours this morning at a round table session organised by Roger, founder of http://www.profinda.com on the changing world of work; how do we organise ourselves in a world where (contrary to Marissa Mayer's preference, perhaps) the teams in which we work don't all sit in orderly divisions within a single … Continue reading Boundary-less organisations – meeting notes
Category: Themes
Nomenclature is terribly important to the way in which we make sense of the world around us. Here are some terms related to the tech world that, quite frankly, are lazy and we could do without*... Digital What isn't digital these days? I'll tell you something... The carpet that my wife and I recently bought. … Continue reading De-cybering digital language: ten terms we could do without
I was in conversation this morning with a colleague who attended an event yesterday focusing on the book publishing industry. The general mood, he said, was that there was anger towards what the likes of Amazon and Google had done to the industry. Media industries in general have, it has to be said, had a … Continue reading Great experiences
By popular request (thanks Francis!) I'm going to get a bit more rigorous about noting books I've read. You'll then be able to find them in a consistent place: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/category/bookshelf/ Recently read: As mentioned in today's blog, Dan Pink's To sell is human. Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy is a very readable exploration of what the … Continue reading Bookshelf
Daniel Pink's latest book, To sell is human is a well-recommended read; his central argument is that in this day and age many of us in roles that aren't "sales" find ourselves having to sell a lot of the time, and that the nature of selling in a world of incredibly well informed buyers has … Continue reading Better pitching
We seem to be entering into a world where the cult of measurement is entering into the personal space, with the buzz term of the "quantified self". I know I'm (yet again) flying in the face of the numerical wind, but I don't want any truck with this. Measurement changes behaviours to hit targets, but … Continue reading The quantified idiot
Many years ago, computers were disconnected. Then they started to become networked, but with a few notable exceptions in academia and the defence world, the networks themselves were disconnected. That was just about the situation in the early 1990s when I started working. One needed extra special permission to be able to have an … Continue reading A “behind the firewall” state of mind
Imagine a world where there was nowhere to shop but massive supermarkets. For some that might not be that far away from the reality of physical shopping these days, but for most of us, to various degrees, we still rely on a mix of generalist and specialist retailers (even if, increasingly, we go and look … Continue reading Specialist shops
Ofstead's Chief Sir Michael Wilshaw is reported this morning as wanting to provide "at a glance" dashboards to allow for monitoring of the performance of schools. The dashboard metaphor is one that has developed over the past dozen years or so, in the corporate ambition of providing "one version of the truth" to aid management … Continue reading A dash to dashboards
And so the flexible working fight hits the ring: in the red corner, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo!, banning home working, in the blue corner (amongst others) Richard Branson, extolling the virtues of flexibility in work. Ding! Ding! Round one... There are an interesting number of paradoxes in this whole debate: the extent to which a … Continue reading Is flexible working?
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