Month: January 2024
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Shoshin, and the Beginner’s Mind
Falling down an internet rabbit hole I ended up on this post, part of an anthology of submissions from the University of Sydney on the topic of ‘simple pleasures’. The author uses Mozart as an exemplar of having a childlike approach to life: ‘Growing up, my piano teacher would paraphrase 20th century pianist Artur Schnabel, saying…
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What the Bar Code tells us about innovation
The bar code has become a completely ubiquitous technology (there are more than 6 billion bar codes scanned every day) and yet it very nearly didn’t happen at all. When it did happen it could so easily have been completely different than how it ended up. I’m a sucker for a good invention tale so…
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On Mastery
One of the most thought-provoking things that I read over the past week was John Durrant’s notes on the book Mastery, by George Leonard (thanks to Johnnie Moore for the link). Worth reading the whole thing of course but they were so good that I wanted to capture some of the more interesting take outs…
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Prioritising the application of AI
One of the key challenges with the application of AI is that it is such a broad technology with such wide potential applications in so many areas how do you prioritise where to place the effort and resource? I’ve had a go before now at categorising potential application of AI through the lens of seven…
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Navigating change – Optimisation vs Transformation
When leaders are looking at how to get the most out of new technologies they will inevitably be faced with a plethora of options, questions, and prioritisation decisions. Making sense of how to navigate that (and how to navigate the dilemma zone in particular) can be a huge challenge. One of my favourite ways of…
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Navigating change – Technology S-curves
As Charlie Ebdy has adeptly pointed out chasing shiny new trends too early can easily result in wasted resources and time. The timing and speed with which new technologies find genuine use cases, and genuine scale and maturity can be notoriously difficult to predict (and some never take off at all). So making smart decisions…
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Making decisions with imperfect information
Thanks to Antony Mayfield for sharing these book notes which Ron Kohavi made about Annie Duke’s book (and also her Maven course) ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When you don’t Have All the Facts’. The notes led me down all kinds of rabbit holes so I’m going to unpick one or two of them…
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Subtraction as a strategy
In a culture of accumulation, the value of taking things away is often overlooked. As I listened to this short Atlantic podcast featuring Professor Leidy KlotzI from University of Virginia (author of Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less) I was reminded of a couple of things about the challenge of subtraction. Firstly, when it comes…
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Strategy on a page
I once worked with a client to create a one page summary of their transformation strategy. We had a name for the strategy, a defined mission and a vision, some associated values, a customer promise, key goals, time gates and measures. The risk with this approach of-course is that it becomes overly reductive and misses…
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The Hype Cycle and the ‘Goldilocks’ Zone
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma have an excellent new report out focusing on major trends in marketing technology. I always think that if you really want to understand how the focus of marketing practice is changing then looking at how technology is deployed in the function is a good place to start. There was a…