One thing: Ski jumping is a truly bizarre sport. Fling yourself down a big ramp to take off into thin air with only a vast mountain to break your fall. What's always stumped me is how one would work one's way up to the first jump. It's not like swimming where you can wear arm … Continue reading The ski-jump thing
Category: Themes
Here's an interesting paradox: teams that include people with greater diversity of background (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, language, academic level, academic subjects...) are likely to have greater diversity of thinking. Greater diversity of thinking is likely to lead to better decision-making, because if the people making the decisions come at things from multiple perspectives they'll … Continue reading Diversity of thought
It used to be that information technology trends started in business and then moved into the consumer space. "Enterprise" edition meant the full-fat, no expense spared version, "consumer" the lite, hobbled, crappy version. And then it all changed. To my mind, starting around 15 years ago as home broadband started to become available, then wireless and … Continue reading The inexorable shift
There are a couple of articles that have sprung up in the business press in recent weeks that have highlighted challenges with collaboration within organizations that have piqued my interest given my current work with #sharingorg. The first, the cover article in the January/February Harvard Business Review, talks about problems of collaborative overload. Specifically, authors Rob Cross, Reb Rebele … Continue reading The wrong tools for the job
The role of BT in providing the digital backbone for our nation is currently in the public spotlight as Grant Shapps has published a report into the state of Internet access in the UK. The report recommends that BT is forced to sell off its infrastructure business OpenReach to encourage more competition and a better service for … Continue reading Broadband – the perfect place for Government as a Platform
The Internet, and in particular social networks, for all their wonderfulness, are crammed full of banal aphorisms, insights that aren't insightful, and motivational proclamations that make me want to take a spoon to my own eyeballs. I saw one of the last category last week on one of the many channels I pop into now and … Continue reading One-speed IT
I've written in the past about the curious evolutionary mutation that happened in the railway industry in the middle of the 20th Century with experiments to develop diesel-fueled steam locomotives. In hindsight the idea of using a different fuel to power an engine that operated using the same propulsion methods as coal-fired steam engines was obviously daft, … Continue reading Steam diesels revisited
The National Audit Office yesterday published a fascinating paper examining the role that contract and consulting staff play within central government and the broader civil service. I found it a somewhat depressing read. The short version: contractors and consultants can be used to help bring in resource on a short-term basis to add skills or capacity when … Continue reading Interchangeable units of resource
Many years ago, when the Chairman of the company I worked for at the time needed convincing that it would be OK to shift our email services out into the Cloud with Google I used this argument: "We trust our most important asset to the Clouds run by the banks, right? There's no cash being stuffed … Continue reading Trusting Clouds
As previously announced last year, with a bunch of fellow free-range freelance professionals, we are coming together to form a community to help each other, share experiences, and generally see how we might make each others' professional lives a bit more enjoyable and effective. There is already a LinkedIn group up and running and on Thursday February … Continue reading Free Range Gathering
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