Month: March 2024
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Moving on from corporate bureaucracy
This was an interesting take from the CEO of Bayer talking about how their company had become strangled by bureaucracy (thanks to Tim Harrap for the prompt). He writes that Bayer’s internal rules for employees fill 1,392 pages, and that employees are trapped in 12 levels of hierarchy which serves to put distance between leaders…
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Traffic lights and roundabouts
There was a lovely analogy that Alison Orsi used in the latest Google Firestarters episode (podcast links here) in which she talks about the secrets of effective marketing transformation. The analogy relates to how important it is for leaders to empower teams to experiment, but for them to test and learn within ‘safe to fail’…
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Building trust in client / agency relationships
Some months back I did a piece of work for the IPA that sought to understand how clients could build mutually beneficial and sustainable relationships with their agency partners. Called Partnering for Growth, the report captured the inputs of a broad range of industry and non-industry experts, academics and both client and agency-side practitioners. I…
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If the Chinese invented everything, why didn’t they rule the world instead of Europe?
This is a fascinating short video featuring the science historian James Burke in which he explains a very convincing theory for why so many major inventions originated in China (often hundreds or even thousands of years before they became popularised in the West) and yet were never used in the way that Europeans used them.…
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Who really invented the light bulb? On collaborative innovation, and the stories we tell
Ask anyone who invented the light bulb and most people would probably say Thomas Edison. And yet, whilst Edison patented the first commercially successful bulb in 1879, the invention was (like many innovations) a cumulative and widely collaborative affair. Several innovators paved the way for the modern electric light bulb including Alessandro Volta, Humphrey Davy,…
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NASA, the Space Shuttle Challenger and Decision-making
There’s a renowned fictional case study (originated by Jack Brittain and Sim Sitkin) which is used in business schools to help students understand the risks around poorly informed decision-making. The scenario that students are given is to imagine that they are John Carter, the founder of a car racing team. The team is coming up…
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Techniques and procedures
This episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast starts with an interesting question (why do airline pilots typically speak in the same way and all sound the same when addressing the passengers?) but then brings in some tangentially interesting concepts towards the end. One of them is what cockpit crews would call ‘techniques and procedures’…