Month: December 2014
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Flexible Technology Stacks
One of the areas that I think companies find hardest to let go of is the concept of locked-down technology stacks. There's no doubt a number of good historical reasons why it was once important to maintain rigid controls over the technologies your staff use, but with the plethora of advanced, secure tools and systems…
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Protecting Against Obsolete Beliefs
'When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world. Is it possible to avoid that? Can you protect yourself against obsolete beliefs? To some extent, yes. I spent almost a decade investing in early stage startups, and curiously enough protecting yourself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you…
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On Design, Strategy and Planning
Shane Parrish had a great extract from (of all places) The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual describing the relationship between design and planning. Worth repeating in full: "While both activities seek to formulate ways to bring about preferable futures, they are cognitively different. Planning applies established procedures to solve a largely understood problem within an…
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On the Renaissance of Email Newsletters
The email newsletter seems to be undergoing something of a continuing renaissance. Quite a number of the smartest people I know now do their own update, and the list of insightful newsletters that now arrive my inbox keeps on growing. Since I first wrote about the Rebirth of the Newsletter, there's a number of others…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here are my favourite links curated this week by Fraggl: It's not out just yet but Adam Morgan's (of EatBigFish) new book 'A Beautiful Constraint' ('An inspiring yet practical guide for transforming limitations into opportunities') looks well worth pre-ordering. I saw Adam speak at the APG Big Thinking conference recently and he was excellent Gosh. Bots now outnumber humans…
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Shipped in 2014
Around this time last year, inspired by something that Ian Sanders had done, I reviewed some of the major projects that I had been involved with that year as a way of taking a step back and looking at the shape of what I’d been spending my (work) time doing. It was a useful thing…
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Strategies of Trajectory
I don't believe in having a digital strategy. But I do believe in having a strategy that is fit for a digitally empowered world (a subtlely expressed but substantively big difference). So I thought John Hagel's thoughts about the shift in emphasis from strategies 'shaped by terrain' to strategies 'shaped by trajectory' were interesting. Traditional…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here are my favourite links curated this week by Fraggl: Some starkly alarming stats on digital display and bot fraud from an ANA report that found that up to 50% of publisher traffic is bot activity, 11% of online ad views and 23% of video ads are from automated cumputer programmes. Google also revealed that around 56% of digital ads…
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The Problem With Powerpoint
Much used, and yet so much maligned. Poor Powerpoint. Latest in a long line of detractors is Evernote CEO Phil Libin who, at Le Web the other day, said that Powerpoint is a 'lot of what's wrong with the world today' and that Office software was partly to blame for making work 'unpleasant for many people'.…
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Systematic Survival Bias
Thanks to Tim Harford's latest column for pointing me at lessons from the story of Amercian Mathematician and Statistician Abraham Wald. In 1943, Wald was part of a group asked to advise the US air force on how they might reinforce their planes to prevent so many of them being lost on bombing raids to enemy…