Today marks the 102nd birthday of my late grandfather Robert Ballantine. It also marks the end of the second year of the Stamp experiment, to a lesser or greater extent a project inspired by Granddad. At this time last year I think I was putting a brave face on things. Many, many positive conversations. Much hope. Very … Continue reading Bertie Day 2015
Things I have learned this week: - old models can still win out, if only by heft and momentum - in the age of the internet you can realise a silly idea in seconds - stopping people from adding everything and the kitchen sink is a challenge - pre-season friendlies are basically an alternate reality … Continue reading Weeknote 252: signals old and new
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
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
Things I have learned this week: - there's always something that's going to get in the way of doing a deal with a big corporate - the Tube strike may have just been an enormous experiment to test the Sunk Cost Fallacy - Londoners seem to not know how London is laid out above ground … Continue reading Weeknote 251: holiday season beckons
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
Numbers are so alluring. Our steps. Our likes. Our "friends". And like Pavlov and his slobbering canines, we get trained to respond to these numbers. But these numbers become self-serving. They become not a means to an end, but an end in their own right. They change their meaning accordingly, and then people game systems … Continue reading Pavlov’s metric
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