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
Things I have learned this week: - London doesn't do hot - a combination of people works wonders for a pitch - distilling big ideas down into consumable parts isn't about using a smaller font - random social media conversations on the train can lead to great things - there again, so can in the … Continue reading Weeknote 250: which feels it should be more significant than it actually is
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
