Year: 2024
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Use the difficulty
I love this from Michael Caine – the philosophy by which he has lived his life: ‘Use the difficulty’ is such a good, pithy way of articulating the benefits of learning from setbacks and challenges. We all have tricky times in our lives, or times when everything feels stalled, or when we feel that we’re…
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On Xerox PARC, and the failure of execution
“Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties.” Steve Jobs When Xerox opened their Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1970 it brought together talented computer engineers, scientists and programmers who were tasked with inventing the computing technologies of the…
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When collaboration gets in the way
We’re used to thinking of collaboration as a universally good thing. Leaders rightly strive to promote a culture of cooperation, contribution and knowledge sharing in the organisation (full disclosure: I’ve consulted and run workshops on this very thing). Employees get assessed on how collaborative they are. Endless tools are created to support it. And yet…
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The power of silence
I loved this video that Johnnie Moore shared, which is a clip from the brilliant BBC show The Assembly. The premis of the show is great – a renowned actor/personality gets interviewed by an audience of neurodivergent, autistic and learning disabled people. In the clip the questioner is at first paralysed by nerves and shyness…
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On becoming ‘the only’
Kevin Kelly has a great provocation, taken from his book Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier, about not always striving to be the best but instead aiming to become ‘the only’. What he means by this is the need to focus on becoming a true reflection of what only you can…
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Using SAMR to navigate technological change
One of my favourite frameworks for helping to understand and navigate technological change is the acronym SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification and Redefinition. SAMR originates from the education sector, and was created by Dr. Ruben Puentedura as a way for instructors to understand how they could best integrate new technology and tools into…
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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.…