We are all suppliers now…

A couple of unrelated conversations in the past week... At the LEF executive forum event last week I heard the London Business School's Rob Goffee speak, and the one abiding memory is how he explored the idea that organisations need to move beyond the idea of employee engagement and motivation if organisations want to be … Continue reading We are all suppliers now…

Time to get unbundled

As consumers, we tend to like to buy products and services that are the sum of their parts. The history of industrialisation has been one of businesses providing bundles of things together in ways that makes the end product or service much more valuable than if we bought the individual elements in isolation. Take, for … Continue reading Time to get unbundled

Weeknote 312: last of the old guard

This week I have learned: the podcast has already generated some interesting new interest an entity relationship model still has the power to unpick a circumstance quicker than many other methods pipelines are things to be managed by oil companies. Sales is much more like bagatelle don't catch up with a friend for a while … Continue reading Weeknote 312: last of the old guard

Monetising legacy

Microsoft yesterday made some big new product announcements, with updates to Windows, and a new range of Surface devices. At the moment I'm involved in a project looking at providing core technology refresh in big corporate organisations, and I struggled to see anything that would have sent a message that Windows is a business-focused, cost … Continue reading Monetising legacy

Generating untold demand

We are all going to be replaced by robots, right? We are at last on the cusp of the leisure society or, by another analysis, about to enter a new era of serfdom where we are all beholden to our Silicon Valley/Chinese/robot overlords. Or are we? A very similar narrative played out in the 1970s … Continue reading Generating untold demand

The need to play

For many years IT departments struggled with the idea that the way in which they delivered services should be based around delivering to the needs of their business. Technology projects would be self-serving, and as a result often fail to deliver anything of value. In the 1990s we started to see the rise of business case-led … Continue reading The need to play

Focus on the middle

There are a couple of tropes on LinkedIn that I find irritating me with increasing frequency at the moment. The first is the "made good" trope, where someone who had nothing now has a job doing something. There's a variant where they have a job and a flash car. I'm sorry, I don't care. The … Continue reading Focus on the middle

Poker face

Whatever your views on Britain leaving the European Union, the country is certain now to be entering an extended period of negotiation with the EU and its member nations to unpick the UK from its forty-year relationship. In the past few weeks there has been a repeated claim from various government ministers that we shouldn't be … Continue reading Poker face

Announcing: the WB-40 Podcast

Next week, along with good chum Chris Weston, I am launching my latest media experiment - a podcast called WB-40. Every week, for 40 minutes (or thereabouts) Chris and I will be exploring a couple of subjects. Next week we start with the themes of Robotics and the Internet of Things. It might be good … Continue reading Announcing: the WB-40 Podcast