Year: 2015
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Google Firestarters 17 – Content Marketing & Complexity
There can be little doubt that Content Marketing has become a huge area of focus for clients of late. In the work that I've done over the past few years it's been evident that many clients have increased not just the time and attention that they give to content, but also the resourcing. Unsurprisingly, agencies of…
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Google Firestarters 17 – Content Marketing & Complexity
There can be little doubt that Content Marketing has become a huge area of focus for clients of late. In the work that I've done over the past few years it's been evident that many clients have increased not just the time and attention that they give to content, but also the resourcing. Unsurprisingly, agencies of…
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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking?
There is a prevailing narrative that the life expectancy of large companies, faced with the challenges of technological disruption, has been reducing for some time. Work done (PDF) by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University (above, and which I talked about here) in particular, seems to show that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500…
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Performance Firestarters 9: The Power of Feeds
For the ninth in our series of Firestarters events for the Performance Marketing community will be focusing on Feeds and APIs, which are changing the advertising landscape in a unique and potentially powerfully way. As well as talking about how the smartest agencies are using feed data to improve campaign results and bring new levels…
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Do Not Follow Your Passion
I liked what VC Ben Horowitz (who wrote the excellent Hard Thing About Hard Things which I really enjoyed) has to say in this commencement address about why 'follow your passion' (something that has become a very popular convention) may not actually be the best career advice. Whilst doing what you love may work out…
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More is Different
"At first, poaching stars from competitors or even teams within the same organization seems like a winning strategy. But once the star comes over the results often fail to materialize…What we fail to grasp is that their performance is part of an ecosystem and removing them from that ecosystem — that is isolating the individual…
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The Modern Blight of Overwork
'…the long hours…may be the byproduct of systems and institutions that have taken on lives of their own and serve no one’s interests. That can happen if some industries have simply become giant make-work projects that trap everyone within them.' Lots of truth in this New Yorker opinion piece about the modern blight of overwork,…
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What Network Science Says About Career Success
Thanks to Peter for pointing me at this piece on 'The No.1 Predictor Of Career Success According to Network Science'. Like Peter I'm not a fan of the term 'career success' (nor of over-analysing Steve Jobs) since we might define success in so many different ways, but Michael Simmons makes a powerful point about something…
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Dots Final Line Up
I'm biased (since I'm curating it) but I'm really excited by who we've got speaking at this year's Dots Conference. The final line up has been confirmed and it's ace. The theme is 'Transformation' and we'll be taking several different angles on that including learnings from those who are leading significant change in their organisations…
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Why it’s Time to Ditch the Annual Performance Review
News came at the end of last month that Accenture were killing off performance reviews and rankings for their employees. They're not the first (Deloitte, Microsoft and Adobe have apparently done so too) but this was notable in being one of the largest companies by headcount (330,000) to do so. Good riddance I say. Performance…