I am, personally, prone to the odd metaphor. "Rainbow shitting unicorns" is one I use with depressing regularity, usually in reference to a quest to find technologies or skills that patently do not exist. A unicorn is a mythical creature. A rainbow shitting variety doubly so. Unfortunately, it seems that Unicorns now has two meanings … Continue reading Crap Tech Industry Metaphors: 15 Unicorns
Category: Themes
I remember a news story from probably about 20 years ago where a full scale nuclear panic was instigated in the back garden of a suburban house in the South East of England when small capsules marked as nuclear waste had been discovered when flowerbeds had been turned over. To cut a long story short, … Continue reading Data as nuclear waste
As they get older (and they are still only 5 and 6) I increasingly find I'm learning from my kids, both in what they tell me and also in what I can observe. Take, for example, how they play with Lego (or "Legos" if you are American - although why, if you're American you can't … Continue reading Three things innovators can learn from Lego
Had a wonderfully mind-stretching time this morning chairing a session for the Winmark L&D network with Nick Shackleton-Jones leading a discussion about Gamification. The session spurred a number of thoughts for me - here are a few of the related links: My own blogging 0n the subject: https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2012/02/13/motivating-through-games/ (includes photo of the marvellous Perspex box) https://mmitii.mattballantine.com/2012/02/14/skinner-the-art-of-motivation/ … Continue reading Gamification – links
I listen to a fair amount of podcast these days. Here's what my Podcast Player is shuffling through (I use BeyondPod, for the record)... Business & Economics StartUp Podcast The first of a few from New York-based Gimlet Media, Startup in its first season followed the trials and tribulations of setting up a podcasting company, in the second … Continue reading Podcast Playlist 2016
Nearly a quarter of a century ago I began on the circuitous path that is my career with a few jobs working for the big accountancy firm KPMG. Back then big accountancy firms were big accountancy firms, but they were beginning their mutation into what they have become today - multidisciplinary professional services providers. Over … Continue reading I fought the law…
The Emotional Change Curve is something of a stock in trade amongst people involved in organizational change management, and a model that I have used extensively over the years. The model and its variants are derived from work by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and plots a series of emotional reacts that people have when confronted by change … Continue reading Changing habits
My LEF colleague Dave Aron posted about a fast food drone delivery service a couple of days ago. Having been recently reading James Garvey's takedown of the PR industry The Persuaders, it got me thinking about how there is an increasing breed of technology publicised these days which, for want of a better term, one could call … Continue reading The unstoppable rise of PRTech
My earliest experiences of computers were as them being tools of creativity, and that's framed my use of them ever since. The BBC Micro didn't really do much unless you gave it fairly comprehensive instructions. Sure, they could be used to play pre-bought games, but in the very early days the thing came with a … Continue reading The tools of mass creation
There are a few scenes from the movies that have, unwittingly, become the archetypes for technologies of the "future", even though the movies themselves are decades old and the future is still to be equally distributed: Holographic video - the Princess Leah "Help us Obi Wan" projection at the beginning of Star Wars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIFJLMyUwrg Wave … Continue reading Cinematic Archetypes and achieving AI
mmitII 