Category: innovation
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WIREWAX 360 Video
This is cool. I met again recently with Steve and Dan, the founders of one of my favourite startups, WIREWAX who have pioneered dynamic clickable interactive video formats. They've done some nice implementations of their technology recently including a shoppable video for Ted Baker (which apparently resulted in £75K worth of click through sales), and one for…
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Gall’s Law
'Gall's Law' comes from John Gall's 1975 book Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail. Gall's work has inspired a number of authors in systems thinking but the book actually focuses more on what we can learn from system engineering failures and how not to design systems. The law (although it was never…
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Agile Strategy Mapping
One of the key challenges in any change programme or strategy implementation is connecting an overarching organisational strategy with the departmental strategies and tactics needed to make it happen and all head in the same direction. And then there is the oft forgotten required conditions, environment and culture that not only supports but enables the…
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Strategy and Tactic Trees
Apart from companies that express or communicate their strategy poorly, or those that conflate a varied set of goals or targets with a coherent strategy (as Richard Rumelt said in Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: ‘Goals are not strategy. Goals are wishes. Strategies are how one goes about achieving goals.’), one of the most common strategy…
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The Lifecycle of a Technology
'Invention is a lot like surfing; you have to catch the wave at the right time.' Ray Kurzweil Digging into Kurzweil's 'S-curves' a bit more I came across his lifecycle of a technology (or invention). Kurzweil noted back in 2004 that the pace of innovation is doubling every decade and so he said that inventions…
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The Agile Team Onion
I really liked Emily Webber's thoughts about Agile team onions. I've talked a lot over the past few years about the power of small multi-disciplinary teams to drive big change, and retain agility as you scale – and concepts like Amazon's two-pizza teams. Although as this piece adeptly describes, the point of two pizza teams…
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ZigZag Inventions
'In 1875, Thomas Edison invented the electric pen. It was a motorized stylus that worked like a stencil: it could punch words through a stack of up to 100 pages. This was supposed to replace copying, which back then was really time consuming. Edison said “There is more money in this than telegraphy.” But users…
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Drink Before You’re Thirsty, Eat Before You’re Hungry
One of my (experienced) cycling friends once told me that on longer rides it was really important to be drinking or eating well before you get thirsty or hungry in order to keep yourself well-hydrated and you’re energy levels high. It was good advice, and something I was reminded of reading Ben Evans’ post on…
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Building the Culture to Move Fast
I think it's very easy when we're trying to move fast as a business to over-focus on the process and under-focus on the environment that enables speed to happen. And here I'm really talking about the culture in which a team is operating. If it's culture that is characterised by trust, which enables a greater…
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Generative Design
Sometimes the whole people and technology debate can seem somewhat polarising, particularly when they're represented as mutually exclusive opposing forces when of-course the most interesting scenarios to work through are how one can augment the other. IA rather than AI. Intelligence Augmentation rather than Artificial Intelligence. With machines beginning to demonstrate not only an increasing ability to…