Silicon Valley seems obsessed with making things frictionless. At the core the removal of barriers to people using their products is a sensible business development strategy. Why on earth would you want to stop people being customers? In the "pay with your data" world of modern web services, it's even more important to allow people … Continue reading Less Frictionless
Category: Themes
When did you last spend some serious thinking time devoted to electric motors? Since getting up I have brushed my teeth, shaved, turned on the dishwasher, seen cars pass me on the walk to the station and boarded a train into London. All have depended on electric motors and yet for the most part we … Continue reading #noIT
Last week I wrote up one of the games I've been playing with groups, here's the next one... Game - Competing objectives Objective: organisations are often trying to get teams working together more effectively. Yet at the same time those same organisations will set individual and team objectives in such a way that makes effective … Continue reading Play Games (2)
"Let's do a podcast" I said to Chris back in around September 2016. Slightly surprisingly he said "Yes". The adventure began. This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while, but only now spurred into it by a chance tweet. It describes technically how we put WB-40 together every week. The editorial … Continue reading Podcasting primer
I have this idea of a probably mythical time in the history of office work. A point in time a few years before my own career began when computers were present but were still the preserve of typists. Tools used exclusively by specialist, trained workers. When the average desk was reserved for paper, a Rolodex … Continue reading The art of decision making
"Collaboration" - a term bandied about liberally yet rarely precisely defined. Over the past few years it's been a subject that I've spent a great deal of time grappling with for various clients. A great deal of that work is summarized here: I've thought about what are the reasons why an organisation might want it's … Continue reading Decomposing collaboration
About a decade ago, when I was heading up technology for the global marketing agency Imagination, we started to explore the idea of what would become known as Bring Your Own Device. We were thinking more radically than was ever likely to actually happen - staff given a Hardware allowance in the way that many … Continue reading Bring Your Own Software
I heard a terribly depressing thing from one of my clients yesterday: We don't have time for the luxury of play It's a sentiment that I hear in one way or another from many of the organisations with which I work. That the Calvinist ethic of hard work has lead to a focus on efficiency … Continue reading Making time for play
This is something of a work in progress, but is a reasonable summary of the work I've been doing in recent years looking at collaboration, collaboration technology. (Latest version here: Collaboration Cheat Sheet)
What time frames does the organisation in which you work operate on? There's the year - financial and calendar (sometimes syncrhonized, but that generally makes for a crap Christmas). There's your "product" cycle - that could be weeks if you are software company, months in fashion, years in automotive or pharma, decades in pensions or … Continue reading Conflicting cycles
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