Month: February 2024
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Breaking out of optimisation
I wrote a post last month on understanding technological-driven change and innovation through the lens of optimisation and transformation. Both can deliver significant benefits but they are fundamentally different approaches. Optimisation involves first order change. It relates to adaptations within the current system or structure that are designed to improve. It tends back to homeostasis…
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Techno-admin and surplus value
A while back over on LinkedIn James Caig wrote a post talking about modern digital services and how ‘technology and automation has led to more customers of those products and services doing more of the work involved in delivering them’. James linked to an article by John Lanchester on Marx’s theory of surplus value, which might…
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On Self-Renewal
This speech on the topic of self-renewal, delivered by John W Gardner to McKinsey & Company in November 1990, is outstanding (thanks to Zoe Scaman for the link). Gardner, who was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare for President Lyndon Johnson, wrote his book Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society in 1963. The…
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The Apps-Infrastructure Cycle
Thanks to Ian Leslie for pointing at this post on the myth of the infrastructure phase in the development of technology (worth reading his ten useful concepts post which mentions it). In the post Dani Grant and Nick Grossman argue that when new technologies emerge we tend to believe that we build out the infrastructure…