I have written in the past about how the language that we attach to failing is part of the fundamental challenge of organisations dealing with the ambiguity of the world we are in. Failure is pejorative, so it's no wonder that people find it so hard to embrace. The lessons from the world of agile … Continue reading Happy mistakes
Category: Themes
In a panel discussion organised by the global pay-wall provider The Times this week, Baroness Lane-Fox of the Interwebs apparently suggested that the UK government should scrap investment into the HS2 programme in favour of high speed internet infrastructure. She's wrong. We need both. And the irony for me is that both of these initiatives … Continue reading Platforms come in many forms
The more I read about the field of Behavioural Economics the more I think that maybe the entire discipline is an increasingly complex set of workarounds to address the more fundamental issue that the science of economics is failing us. It takes a lot to shift an entire academic discipline's mindset, and the period leading … Continue reading Copernicus
London yesterday was plunged into the sort of stiff-upper-lipped, passive-aggressive chaos that we Londoners seem to be so good at as the entire Tube network was shut down by industrial action. Putting aside the whys and wherefores of the strike itself (although as the 40-something parent of two small children, living in the suburbs, there … Continue reading Down the tubes
A chap I met yesterday asked me if I could recommend some sources to help him get his head around "digital". Now whilst I'm sure that whattheheckisdigital.com exists, as an exercise in identifying my own sources of influence it was interesting, because it highlighted how much of my work is synthesising from diverse sources. Here's … Continue reading A digital reading list
I was lucky enough yesterday to be invited along to an event organised by the Corporate Research Forum by an old colleague of mine from my leadership training days. The lure, other than a good catch up with Sean, was to hear former Labour party communications head Alastair Campbell speak. Before the event I was … Continue reading Winners
Reflecting on last week's news about Microsoft's strategic direction, one thing stands out at a very base level: three years or so since Microsoft acquired both Yammer and Skype and it still appears that "important" communications are done by email first. That's probably the same for just about every major global organisation, but if the … Continue reading Through internal channels
So in the verbose email style it seems so ingrained in the culture of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has announced a new mission statement for the Redmond behemoth - to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. A really great mission statement, to my mind, combines four key attributes: aspiration, specificity and tangibility, … Continue reading Mission to nowhere?
I had a fascinating chat with Mark Earls yesterday in the vague sun of Holborn. Towards the end of our broad conversation we got onto the subject of Behavioural Economics, and Mark's frustration that the entire field seems to be dominated by a meme that describes our human ability to shortcut processing (effectively Kahneman's System … Continue reading Cognitive strengths, not bias bugs
There seems to be a repeating narrative about the rise of the robots going on at the moment: from the front page of this month's Harvard Business Review, to Channel 4 prime time drama on Sunday nights, the robots are coming and they're after us, our jobs, our sanity... Now, last time I looked, the most … Continue reading Dumbing down
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