There is a wonderfully thoughtful piece that Richard Martin has published about change in organisations and our increasingly pseudo-scientific, Taylorist approaches to management in organisation that are to a great extent being driven by technology adoption. I chimed with almost all of what he wrote (and loved the borrowed phrase "I don't want to be … Continue reading People-led change
Category: Themes
I'm currently reading Ian Cox's new book Disrupt IT, a book that outlines his views on how IT departments need to restructure and refocus themselves to be fit for purpose in 2014 and beyond. I'll dig into that in more detail when I've finished it, but it's provoked one thought that's so bloomin' obvious … Continue reading Misnomer
Next Wednesday I'm going to be presenting at the Connected Business event at Olympia. You can find my slides for this whistle-stop tour through the #socialCEO report and thoughts on networking in the social network era above!
A couple of weekends ago I took delivery of my 18th ever mobile phone - a LG/Google Nexus 5 (you can see the history of the rest here). A couple of weeks later, and in the bubble of noise coming out of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I can only conclude one thing: … Continue reading Phone 18
Insurance is an interesting game. Essentially it's an activity of risk management: attempting to find things of concern to a large number of people that are relatively improbable. The gap between the insurance premiums and the payouts is the profit margin, and at the core of the whole proposition is the unknown risk. As a … Continue reading Reducing risk
There are times when I reckon I just don't get it. The world out there is different to the way I think, and I've got some sort of gap in my cognitive abilities. Last night's news about the WhatsApp purchase by Facebook (for anything up to a report $19Bn) was one of the those times, … Continue reading Bloody hockey sticks
The recent Year of Code debacle has had me looking back at the work of the first great coding educationalist, Seymour Papert. If you're not aware of Papert's work, but you are of a certain age, you may have come across his programming language invention Logo - a syntax to control the actions of … Continue reading Purple turtles
I always enjoy my conversations with Andy Law because he's one of those people with whom I can have a chat and leave feeling that I've learned something, but without feeling stupid for not knowing it before. Yesterday we caught up and he introduced me to the French sociologist Bourdieu's "Four Forms of Capital" (for … Continue reading Why Apple are so powerful – a sociological view
There's been a heck of a lot of advice being bandied around to new Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in the past couple of weeks. And almost all that I've read has been focused on the Windows 8/Windows 9/Windows Phone dimension of the company. The company has three big revenue pillars, and the Windows operating system … Continue reading Out of office
About six months ago I started writing a series of observations about how the world of technology and marketing and communications are being changed by one another, and how many of the industries that have built up in those fields don't feel to be a particularly good fit any more. It then sat in my … Continue reading /marketing TheNewThing
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