Category: insight
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The Ascendancy of Soft Skills in Marketing
I recently completed a fairly big piece of research work for the smart folk at Econsultancy that was focused on understanding how the shape and scope of marketing skills is shifting in response to the impact of digital technologies. It was a pretty engrossing project, the output of which is a report I authored on the Skills of…
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User-centricity
A great view on really putting the user at the centre, from a Google engineer (via Paul Frampton).
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The 70, 20 ,10 Approach to Innovation
When I talk to companies about digital culture, agility and innovation I often end up talking about organisational focus and particularly the challenge of embedding continuous innovation. Joel Gascoigne, the co-founder of Buffer has a great post on just this (and I've written before about Buffer as an exemplar of organisational culture). He references this…
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First Principles Thinking
This piece by Noah Brier on first principles thinking really struck a chord when I read it and has been going round in my head ever since. Noah quotes from Elon Musk, who draws a distinction between the common use of analogy in business (we are doing this because it’s like something else that was…
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Performance Firestarters 5: Data – The Event
//instagram.com/p/nLneboIuF4 Thursday evening saw the fifth in our spin off series of Google Firestarters events for the search and performance marketing community, on the theme of data. It’s been eight years or so since Clive Humby (co-founder of DunHumby) first compared data to oil but somehow there remain huge challenges in extracting the full potential that…
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Keeping Up Appearances
"I think there's a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate. More often than not the energy they expend on seeming impressive makes their actual performance worse. A few years ago I read an article in which a car magazine modified the…
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Culture At Buffer
The Buffer Culture – Version 0.3 from Buffer Econsultancy had a post with eight different takes on company culture. One of them came from Buffer (worth checking out the Etsy one too) which I'd seen before, but it's worth a reminder of the nine values on which they base their culture: Always choose positivity and…
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Creativity Inc
It's not often I recommend a business book before it's even out (and before I've even read it) but Creativity Inc by (Pixar president and co-founder) Ed Catmull looks excellent. I've long been fascinated by how Pixar work, and have used them as an organisational culture exemplar for a good while. This 2008 HBR article on…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here's my favourites from this week, curated by Fraggl: "If you win the rat race, you're still a rat". An extraordinary view on work, joy, and how to live rather than exist from Anna Quindlen, taken from a commencement address (above) never given but widely circaulated Lovely: What to do if you’re falling out of love with New York An exceptional post from Martin Wiegel…
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What Makes Large Companies Fail?
This piece in Quartz focusing on research into the implosion of Canadian Telecoms giant Nortel is fascinating. The study, by the Telfer School of Management at the University of Ottawa, seems to be very comprehensive. They interviewed 48% of all the Nortel executives who were in charge of the company from 1997 through to 2009 when it…