A few years ago I had a fascinating conversation with a journalist about a particular aspect of the psychology of working in an office. He told me that when he needed to read a book as part of his work, in the office he found it impossible because of an overbearing feeling that reading a … Continue reading A subversive sixty minutes
Category: Themes
This week I have learned: that a chance conversation over coffee with someone in San Francisco can be the starting point of a series of actions that ends up with my dad going viral on Twitter. No one saw that coming. the peaks and troughs of account management are bizarre. Weeks pass quietly and then … Continue reading Weeknote 644: Viral
Nearly seven years ago, Chris Weston and I set up WB-40, a podcast loosely about technology. We didn't really know what we were doing, and if you listen to some of the early episodes, that is abundantly clear. A few years later, we were asked to help train some people in a government department technology … Continue reading How to make a podcast
Nudgestock, apparently the world’s biggest festival of behavioural economics, happened last week and I was fortunate to be in attendance in the Old Truman Brewery in London. The year’s theme was “messy”, something close to my own heart. Mess is, to my mind, a prerequisite for creative thinking. Here are 8 messy ideas I collected … Continue reading Eight messy ideas from Nudgestock 2023
In Claire L Evans' wonderful book Broad Band: The untold story of the women who made the internet there is a particularly interesting observation about how a conference held in 1968 in the Bavarian ski resort of Garmisch had a huge impact on the gender bias in the computing industry. In the late 1960s there … Continue reading Prompt Midwives
Today's coffee companion is a data person. We talked about: the huge great hype machine that is going on around LLMs and machine learning the lack of qualitative data in business and organisations Goodhart's and Campbell's laws the strange cycles that emerge around financial periods ownership of data (or, more often, the lack thereof) how … Continue reading 76th of 100
Today's coffee companion is a marketing consultant. We talked about: the nature of coaching getting into organisations through one's professional discipline the tech hub that is Leeds conferences the loneliness of free-range working the surprising cross-over between our networks despite geographic distance the way that timezone might be a bigger gap in how networks form … Continue reading 74th of 100
In the 1990s, the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Momderman pioneered a radical approach to urban design known as "Shared Space" or "Naked Streets". At its core was the idea that street furniture, from kerbstones to road markings to signs and traffic lights, stopped people using the space from communicating with one another. Remove them, and … Continue reading Naked organisations
There are a lot of duopolies in the world. Coke and Pepsi. Windows and Mac. Android and iOS. Labour and Conservative. When you have a duopoly it's really hard to get a new entrant in to break it. Remember Virgin Cola? Remember OS/2? Remember Windows Phone? Remember the Liberal Democrats? I was working at Microsoft … Continue reading Apple’s Duopoly Challenge
On this day in 2022, I entered the Equal Experts offices in Farringdon, London, for the very first time as an employee. After nearly three years in my last role, I'd got to a point where I knew that I'd done enough to get RHP onto a different track, and it was time to do … Continue reading One year on…
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