Year: 2014
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Creativity Inc
It's not often I recommend a business book before it's even out (and before I've even read it) but Creativity Inc by (Pixar president and co-founder) Ed Catmull looks excellent. I've long been fascinated by how Pixar work, and have used them as an organisational culture exemplar for a good while. This 2008 HBR article on…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourites from this week, curated by Fraggl: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat". An extraordinary view on work, joy, and how to live rather than exist from Anna Quindlen, taken from a commencement address (above) never given but widely circaulated Lovely: What to do if you’re falling out of love with New York An exceptional post from Martin Wiegel…
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What Makes Large Companies Fail?
This piece in Quartz focusing on research into the implosion of Canadian Telecoms giant Nortel is fascinating. The study, by the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, seems to be very comprehensive. They interviewed 48% of all the Nortel executives who were in charge of the company from 1997 through to 2009 when it…
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Prototyping is a Process, Not a Thing
I liked a lot of what (friend of ODF) Stuart Eccles had to say here about the process of prototyping at MadeByMany. He talks about how prototyping is an on-going process that might involve dozens of prototypes, each with a speciifc learning goal (typically the most important thing that needs to be identified at that stage of…
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Agility and Organisational Change
Agility and Organisational Change from Neil Perkin I've been doing a regular opening keynote for the Google Squared programme for well over a year, and more recently they asked if I would also run a session focused on organisational agility and change. This was pretty fortuitous as it gave me a chance to pull together…
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Agile is not a Process – it Defines a Culture
I’ve been reading Michael Sahota’s Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide (from which the title of this post is taken) and finding myself nodding in violent agreement with much of its sentiment. The word ‘agile’ seems to be being applied all over the place in all sorts of contexts right now but I've long held that…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourites from this week, curated by Fraggl: Follow the frog (above) is a wonderfully executed ad for The Rainforest Alliance and well worth a watch A new study by researchers at the University of California, Yale, and Facebook has found that moods can spread virally through social media ("If New York City’s rain-induced pathos could affect users in New Mexico, it…
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A New Brand Of Marketing
Scott Brinker is one of my favourite writers on the convergence of marketing and technology. He has an excellent blog, and has just released a free (and at 40-odd pages, short) book on A New Brand Of Marketing. He defines this in the context of two overarching shifts – a broadening in the scope of…
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How Google Hire
There were a couple of things that really stood out to me in this interview with Laszlo Bock, the SVP of people operations for Google, talking about the criteria they use for hiring. Whilst vertical skills such as coding are important for a significant proportion of roles, the significance of softer skills is really emphasised. I…
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Google Firestarters 11 – The Strategy is Delivery – The Event
Last week we had Russell Davies, Creative Director at the Government Digital Service and erstwhile Head of Planning at Nike, Wieden and Kennedy and Ogilvy amongst others, speak at our eleventh Google Firestarters event. I’ve long wanted to have Russell at a Firestarters and he didn’t disappoint. Regular readers will know of my admiration for…