Month: April 2014
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First Principles Thinking
This piece by Noah Brier on first principles thinking really struck a chord when I read it and has been going round in my head ever since. Noah quotes from Elon Musk, who draws a distinction between the common use of analogy in business (we are doing this because it’s like something else that was…
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Performance Firestarters 5: Data – The Event
//instagram.com/p/nLneboIuF4 Thursday evening saw the fifth in our spin off series of Google Firestarters events for the search and performance marketing community, on the theme of data. It’s been eight years or so since Clive Humby (co-founder of DunHumby) first compared data to oil but somehow there remain huge challenges in extracting the full potential that…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl: I really like the look of Bossy (above and below). Bossy is a project from design student Lucas Neumann. A wonderfully thought through and lovely looking productivity device that connects to your calendars, apps and to do lists to display your top three priorities as bubbles on the screen.…
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Don’t F**k Up The Culture
I loved this story from AirBnB co-founder Brian Chesky about the importance of organisational culture. He describes a visit from Peter Thiel just after they'd closed their Series C funding round in 2012 in which Thiel invested $150m in the fledgling business. When Chesky asked him what was the single most important piece of advice he…
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Keeping Up Appearances
"I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here are my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl: Redefining handmade, redefining manufacturing, redefining Etsy. A really interesting piece about Etsy's fork in the road, and how it's dealing with the issues that come with scale An unexpected but interesting history of how the ⌘ symbol came about Nicely put from John Willshire – Knowledge…
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Performance Firestarters 5: Data
You'll know by now that we have a spin-off series of Google Firestarters events that I also curate and that are specifically designed for the performance and search marketing community (we've looked at mobile, future of search, attribution and so on). We were calling them 'SearchFirestarters', but bearing in mind the breadth of their appeal…
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The Best Way to Organise Your Business Communications is not to Organise Them At All
Thanks to this Quartz piece for that rather lovely headline. Mentioned in that piece is Slack, an interesting looking chat app that is touted by some as a more efficient way for teams to communicate internally and which is apparently growing rapidly in popularity since its launch in February, notably amongst technologists including teams at Adobe, Medium, and Rdio. Slack's USP…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourites from this week, curated by Fraggl: Handy – a concise compendium of Don Draper's creative advice A good piece on analytics and the art of storytelling Now this is a good idea - a hospital door handle that sanitises hands with a touch A whole bunch of Ad Contrarianism in one talk from Bob Hoffman And of-course you can sign up…
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iDoneThis
Reading some more around the organisational culture at Buffer, I came across iDoneThis. It's a simple productivity app that (as you can see above) sends staff a reminder email each evening asking what they did that day. The next day, staff get a digest with what everyone on the team managed to get done. As…