Category: Agile
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The Paradox of Automation
This post from Marc Rubinstein (which was shortlisted for this month's Post of the Month vote) on the lessons from the tragic crash of Air France Flight 447 ten years ago gathered together a number of interesting concepts. One of these was
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I’m Writing Another Book
It's been almost two years since my first book came out. Writing that book was something of a cathartic exercise for me, having worked for many years to help companies of all types become more native to the digital empowered world in
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Bullshit Jobs
'Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is
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Valuing Curiosity in Business
'Curiosity fundamentally conflicts with the scalable efficiency model that dominates virtually all of our institutions – we anticipate a big shift from scalable efficiency to scalable learning driven by a changing economic environment' John Hagel Curiosity is one of those qualities in
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Bureaucracy
“Bureaucracy is a massive, role-playing game. If you’re an advanced player, you know how to deflect blame, defend turf, manage up, hoard resources, trade favors, negotiate targets and avoid scrutiny. Those who excel at the game, unsurprisingly, are unenthusiastic about changing it.”
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Getting Things Done in Large Organisations
When I work with leadership teams in big companies it's often apparent just how hard it is to get (new) things off the ground. It's almost as if the company is set up to thwart people who want to create something new
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Bike-shedding
Thanks to Richard Shotton for pointing me at Russell Davies' description of 'bike-shedding' as a way to describe the way that significant amounts of time get wasted in corporate meetings by focusing on trivial issues that attendees know more about. Worth quoting
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The Future of Marketing Operations
I'm a fan of marketing technologist Scott Brinker's work in bringing a healthy dose of insight, perspective and understanding to the increasingly complex world of martech. His annual surveys of martech vendors demonstrate brilliantly the sizeable impact of technology on the discipline
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How the Music Industry Became its Own Worst Enemy
This episode of the Hit Parade podcast from Slate is a wonderfully geeky look at how the record industry tried to kill retail sales of the single in the 90s in favour of the more lucrative album format, but it’s also a
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Unknown Unknowns
Noah Brier has a great analysis of the true origins of the 'Unknown unknowns' framework which looks something like this: Despite being brought to wide attention by Donald Rumsfeld's remarks about Iraq, the concept has origins that seemingly stretch further back and derive