Google Firestarters Episode 17: Russell Davies

The next episode of Google Firestarters is just published, and features the ever erudite Russell Davies. Russell is his usual brilliant self in this, talking about how the most successful strategists are the people that can manage to get an organisation to actually DO something. Meaning that that is what you should optimise for, not just being right (I loved this: 'There's the effective cross-field pass or there's the step-over. Planning does too many step-overs'). He talks about the value of brutal simplicity but also how hard it is to make things easy. And there's also some wonderfully provocative opinions about how the future will be characterised not by more data, but by less and more meaningful data, how little we learn from awards and case-studies ('no-one ever tells the real stories of what actually happened so there is no institutional learning'). Oh, and Russell also tells us the best interview question I think I've ever heard. You can watch or listen to the episode here.