I was chatting with a former colleague over coffee yesterday, and he was recounting how his company recently went through a business continuity exercise. When I say "exercise", I mean that his company lost power to their offices for a number of days and they had to work out what the hell to do. They're … Continue reading Crisis management
Category: Themes
Just about 10 years ago I was working out my notice from my role at the BBC, awaiting the start of a new stage in my career consulting with a management training company. I was chatting about the new direction with an old school friend who, when she heard what I was about to do, looked … Continue reading Talking in crowds
At the weekend my five and a half year-old desktop PC went "Pop!". Well, I say "Pop" - it actually didn't do anything at all. This is a dead PC. Understanding under the covers of a computer is one of the few vaguely manual talents I possess. Box opened, original motherboard battery swapped, fans cleaned... … Continue reading And the box went “pop”
I've had two interesting, and diametrically opposed, conversations in the past couple of weeks on the subject of trust... Yesterday I met someone who was recounting the experience of a friend working in the visual effects industry. VFX as it's known in the trade is something of a boom industry in the UK at the … Continue reading Building trust
The announcement yesterday that Google and PWC are to join forces to deliver the Google for Work services delivers another plank in a strategy that seems to be turning Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma on its head. In Christensen's oft-cited model, technology providers are often unable to respond to competitive threats because of the need to … Continue reading The inverted dilemma
London has two major orbital roads - the North and South Circular roads that entrap the centre of the city, and the M25 the 100+mile behemoth that boundaries Greater London. To be inside or outside of the M25 these days is the statement of how London you really are. In my childhood I vaguely remember … Continue reading The M25 of Tech
A few days ago I saw a blog post where someone was expressing their dissatisfaction with the business networking site LinkedIn. I’ve come to one conclusion – LinkedIn is worthless to me. Alright, so blunt cynicism aside, I’ve not found very many benefits from the site. It seems like you connect with people who barely … Continue reading Writing a novel
I've been thinking about the ways in which media industries (and others) have been disrupted by the world of digital, and am playing around with the idea of four key stages: Pre-digital The world where things existed in analogue and physical form. Think record shops and vinyl and cassettes. Think bookshops and libraries. Think news agents and … Continue reading Four stages of digital disruption
Employee engagement is big business. Entire consulting industries are devoted to measuring and tracking the levels of engagement that are displayed by a company's staff, and implementing programmes of work to try to nudge the scores upwards. An engaged workforce is a productive workforce, so the correlations tell us. But correlations and causality are two … Continue reading Employer engagement
In a few conversations in recent days I've been noticing how there is often an assumptive merging of two (for me) distinct concepts - millennials and digital natives. I see myself as a digital native. Although I can kind of remember a time without computers around me, I struggle to. I taught myself to program … Continue reading Millennial state of mind
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