Pivot and pass

The Pivot is a concept well beloved in the Lean Startup community. Always be looking for the way in which your product or service can be changed to adapt to new markets, new customers and/or new applications. To hear the Lean Startupers go on about it, sometimes you'd think they'd invented the concept. But the … Continue reading Pivot and pass

The only way is ethics*

A while back I wrote about an increasing feeling of worry I have with the way in which many disruptive digital start ups seem to take a fairly dismissive attitude to the established norms of society. Whilst that's on the one hand somewhat obvious (how can you be disruptive if you're not challenging the status … Continue reading The only way is ethics*

The Sharing Organization

A few weeks ago I was able to announce, somewhat cryptically, another role on my ever-extending LinkedIn profile - as a Research Associate for the Leading Edge Forum. Now I can put some meat on the bones... The LEF have commissioned me to run an extensive research project looking into a topic which has fascinated … Continue reading The Sharing Organization

Run to where the ball will be passed…

I'm not generally a big fan of sporting metaphors in business, as they tend to be overly reductive, but the one that has been adapted from a quote Canadian ice hockey-player Wayne Gretzky is interesting and something that I'm hearing quite a bit these days: I skate to where the puck is going to be, … Continue reading Run to where the ball will be passed…

Waterfall 2.0

From a parallel universe somewhere in the future... The trouble started back in 2017 with the launch of the #noProjects Manifesto. Agile and DevOps had become the norm, and so a group of bright engineers put two and two together and declared that the age of software projects was dead. Sometimes the logic of engineers … Continue reading Waterfall 2.0

Kate Moss syndrome

In all of the recent hubbub of coverage amounting from the New York Times' expose of how Amazon works, one aspect I haven't seen much comment on is how all of this comment might actually be in Amazon's interest. The "revelations" shouldn't come as any great surprise to anyone - especially anyone who has read … Continue reading Kate Moss syndrome

Insourcing

There was a great article by Horace Dediu on his Asymco blog on Monday looking at some of the causes of how big organisations went from being early adopters of information technology to be late, or even laggards, in the past 10 years. My paraphrased take is that whilst the tech world has shifted from … Continue reading Insourcing

Chain mail

My wife’s smartphone went into overdrive last night. Some poor schmuck had managed to send a trivial service request to mailing lists that meant that everyone in the 30,000+ company received a copy. Madness ensued of the thousands of “PLEASE DON’T REPLY TO ALL” replied to all type, interspersed with wry, witty or just downright … Continue reading Chain mail