Month: July 2014
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OKRs
Thanks to the always good Wunderkammer newsletter for pointing me at this piece on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) the simple but very sensible organisational system that originated in Intel but has been a long-term staple at Google. The system, involving setting quarterly measurable, definitive objectives at a company, team and/or individual level, and then supporting that…
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Failure Demand
"The distinction between 'failure demand' – demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for the customer and 'value demand' – what the call centre exists to provide, is a distinction that few call centre managers make. I find that many call centre managers do try to determine the reasons for…
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Manager’s and Maker’s Time
"In my experience, most people don’t schedule their work. They schedule the interruptions that prevent their work from happening." I'm over in NYC on a brief work trip and whilst here managed a catch up with Dan. One of the things we ended up talking about was this great piece on the chokehold of calendars…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
A bit late due to travel but here are my favourite links from this past week, curated by Fraggl: Nicely put: The great fragmentation or why we're all weirdos now This makes sense - the future of passwords is no passwords One of the fascinating Superflux projects talked about at this week's Firestarters by Anab Jain: Open Informant Nice anti-road rage work here (above)…
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The Growth Share Matrix Revisited
Thanks to Andrew Warren-Payne for pointing me at this work by Boston Consulting Group revisiting their classic growth share matrix. The matrix, originated by BCG founder Bruce Henderson 40 years ago, famously plots a product portfolio on a 2 x 2 against growth rate and market share, giving us categorisations like 'stars', 'problem child' (or…
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Google Firestarters 12 – Designing for the Future – The Event
Wednesday night saw the great and the good of UK planning come together for our twelfth (twelfth!) Google Firestarters event, themed around ‘Designing for the Future’, and we had three amazing speakers who gave three excellent provocations. Anab Jain, TED fellow, founder of Superflux, lecturer at the Royal College of Art (and whose work has…
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Dots – A New Conference About Innovation and Connecting Ideas
I'm happy to be working with the smart folk at Brilliant Noise to curate a brand new conference on innovation which will be a part of the excellent Brighton Digital Festival in September. The festival is one of the most eclectic and rapidly growing festivals of ideas in Europe (the 2013 festival had an audience of over 41,000…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourite links from this week, curated by Fraggl: A fascinating look inside the creative process (above) of screenwriter Dustin Lance Black ("Milk" and "J. Edgar") Some good data here illustrating 5 key things about how younger generations consume media I like the idea behind this book - three business school professors travel the back roads of America in search of innovation The peculiar physics…
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Google Firestarters 12 – Designing for the Future
The next Google Firestarters event is happening next week on Tues 15th at 6.15pm, at Google HQ in London. We're theming the event around 'Designing for the Future', and considering how we design for a world filled with sensors, connected devices, wearables and embedded internet. The only thing we can say for sure is that…
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Solving the Big Problems
"When I talk to most companies, I do think their leaders are pretty short-term focused…It’s pretty difficult to solve big problems in four years. I think it’s probably pretty easy to do it in 20 years. I think our whole system is setup in a way that makes it difficult for leaders of really big…