Category: innovation
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Speed + Focus = Momentum
One thing (out of many) that has stuck with me from Nick Haley's (Director of UX at The Guardian) talk at AdaptiveLab's recent Harnessing Disruption event was about the need not just for speed, but for momentum in innovation. Nick talked quite a bit about how speed can disrupt large organisations since it disrupts legacy processes,…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here are my favourite links from this week curated by the brand new Fraggl: I really liked Flic - the wireless smart button (above). It's currently busting through it's funding target on Indiegogo. Meanwhile over on Kickstarter: Hashkey is the dedicated one key keyboard for the hashtag Fantastically useful – an excellent series of free Stanford lectures on 'How to Start a Startup' A smart…
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The Thin Internet
A while back I wrote a post about distributed and destination thinking as a way of framing not just an approach to content but also a more ‘digitally-native’ way of looking at the world. Distributed thinking relates to content and interaction that lives out there, away from your domain, in the stream, so your job…
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Peter Thiel on Company Culture
"'Company culture' doesn’t exist apart from the company itself: no company has a culture; every company is a culture." In Zero to One, Thiel frequently talks about company culture in the context of people – which is of-course as it should be. He talks about how critical recruiting is for any organisation ('Recruiting is a…
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Zero to One
"Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. Of course, it’s easier to…
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How Google Works
How Google Works from Eric Schmidt I've bought but yet to read Eric Schmidt's new book on How Google Works. In the meantime comes this handy slideshare summarising some of the key points. Lots to take from it, and lots of good validation for many of the things that I consult with companies about and…
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The Right People
In Good To Great, Jim Collins' research emphasised just what a difference finding the right people to fill the right positions in a company makes to that company’s performance. This intuitively sounds like an obvious thing to say, but I think it's once of the hardest things to get right. Not least because of the (internal…
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Never Outsource The Future
When I did the research for the work behind what became the Econsultancy Best Practice Guide to Insourcing and Outsourcing it became clear pretty quickly that the dynamic of what companies choose to do in-house and what they outsourced to third parties is a continually shifting one. There were disciplines that were increasingly being migrated…
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Buzzfeed and the Full Stack Startup
In the latest a16z podcast Chris Dixon (who now sits on the board of BuzzFeed following Andreessen Horowitz’s recent $50m investment) interviews Buzzfeed's founder, Jonah Peretti. One of the things that interests me most about Buzzfeed is that (in common with a new breed of media upstarts including Quartz, Circa, Medium, Vice) they are building a media…
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Email Transparency
We all know how much of a challenge the ceaseless tide and pressure of email can be. A recent McKinsey Global Institute paper found that Email consumes an average of 13 hours, or 28% of the average working week. Quartz calculated that this meant on average that “the time spent on reading and answering email costs a company $20,990…