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
Things I have learned this week: - it's still all to easy to get sucked into thinking about systems, not thinking about people - and software companies encourage that kind of thing as much as they possibly can - some interesting alignments of ideas yet again from serendipitous meetings - the multi-client juggle has its … Continue reading Weeknote 249: start with purpose
So in the verbose email style it seems so ingrained in the culture of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has announced a new mission statement for the Redmond behemoth - to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. A really great mission statement, to my mind, combines four key attributes: aspiration, specificity and tangibility, … Continue reading Mission to nowhere?
I had a fascinating chat with Mark Earls yesterday in the vague sun of Holborn. Towards the end of our broad conversation we got onto the subject of Behavioural Economics, and Mark's frustration that the entire field seems to be dominated by a meme that describes our human ability to shortcut processing (effectively Kahneman's System … Continue reading Cognitive strengths, not bias bugs
