Category: innovation
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The Extensible Self
I'm somewhat biased (since I curated it) but last Friday's Dots Conference, run by the smart folk at Brilliant Noise, was excellent. One of my favourites out of a whole bunch of inspiring and insightful talks came from Stuart Turner, founder of Robots and Cake, who talked about the transformational power of robotics. Stuart began…
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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking?
There is a prevailing narrative that the life expectancy of large companies, faced with the challenges of technological disruption, has been reducing for some time. Work done (PDF) by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University (above, and which I talked about here) in particular, seems to show that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500…
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More is Different
"At first, poaching stars from competitors or even teams within the same organization seems like a winning strategy. But once the star comes over the results often fail to materialize…What we fail to grasp is that their performance is part of an ecosystem and removing them from that ecosystem — that is isolating the individual…
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What Network Science Says About Career Success
Thanks to Peter for pointing me at this piece on 'The No.1 Predictor Of Career Success According to Network Science'. Like Peter I'm not a fan of the term 'career success' (nor of over-analysing Steve Jobs) since we might define success in so many different ways, but Michael Simmons makes a powerful point about something…
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Dots Final Line Up
I'm biased (since I'm curating it) but I'm really excited by who we've got speaking at this year's Dots Conference. The final line up has been confirmed and it's ace. The theme is 'Transformation' and we'll be taking several different angles on that including learnings from those who are leading significant change in their organisations…
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Pirate Metrics
We're used to looking at financial statements to monitor the progress of established businesses but when you're a startup that may not generate revenue for some time this is less useful. If we consider a startup as essentially (in the words of Steve Blank) 'an organization built to search for a repeatable and scalable business model', then what is…
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Dots Conference 2015
Last year I curated Dots Conference – run by Antony Mayfield and the smart folk at Brilliant Noise, and a key part of the Brighton Digital Festival. It was lots of fun, and the feedback was great from the people that came along, so I was really happy when Antony asked me to curate it…
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The Importance of Reflection
Consistently building in reflection time at the end (or indeed in the middle) of projects is something that most companies rarely do well and often end up considering as something of a luxury. In the rush of the day-to-day we get very good at being relentlessly forward focused, immediately moving on to the next thing,…
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Creativity in Business
This, from The Book of Life: "…business creativity is a little different from artistic creativity. A company is a group of individuals gathered together to solve a problem for other people. This helps to define what the true focus of business creativity should be: intense and lateral thinking about what could be missing from the…
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Visual Cues, Habits and Motivation
My first job after University (which was actually a Polytechnic if you can remember back when there were such things) was selling space in recruitment directories. There was a recession on at the time (hence very few jobs for graduates with non-vocational degrees) and I kind of fell into it. But in many ways I…