Category: insight
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The Digital Talent Time-Bomb
A fair bit of my recent working life has been taken up working with the smart folk at Econsultancy on a truly fascinating piece of research into how client organisations are structuring their digital marketing capability. It's been something of a massive task to navigate through the complexity of variables and surrounding factors and trends…
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The Divided Brain
"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant" Albert Einstein This latest RSA Animate by reknowned psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist (and the accompanying book) is a powerful evcoation of how the divergent, contradistinct nature of the thinking from the two hemispheres of our brain (and how they interelate) have…
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Playing The Long Game
As an interesting addendum to the post below I came across this Quora answer from an ex-Amazon employee to the question 'What allows Amazon to be so innovative?'. Alongside mentions of visionary leadership, entrepreneurial culture and future-focused approach, there is of-course talk of the relentless customer focus for which Amazon is famed (and the 'working back…
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Have Focus Groups Had Their Day?
"They just ensure that you don’t offend anyone, and produce bland inoffensive products." Jonathan Ive I'll admit to having never really been fond of focus groups. For quite some time I've been troubled by the question of whether they yield quite the value that companies seem to invest in them. Or rather, I should perhaps more…
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Playing With Ratios
Fred Wilson writes an interesting post about what he calls the common 'web/mobile laws of physics', making the observation that many of the tech services and companies they see as VCs exhibit similar ratios between the number of registered user or downloads (if it's a mobile app) the service has, the number of monthly and…
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Slowing Down Time
Seeing Noah's post prompted me to re-read Steven Johnson's rather lovely piece that talks about his reasons for moving from his long-time home city of New York, across to the West coast and San Francisco. This kind of change, believes Johnson, is intrinsically good in itself because the changed context helps you see your old…
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Predicting The Present
An interesting thought as part of the whole agile thing, is about how competitive advantage will increasingly come from not only being able to make an informed prognosis of the future, but an informed prediction of the present. Much market intelligence, and even important indicators such as retail sales data, are published weeks after the…
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Sunday Sermon
Ken Robinson on Passion from The School of Life on Vimeo. I saw Sir Ken Robinson talk about this in person a couple of years ago and it was one of the best talks I've ever been to. Sir Ken believes that everyone is born with tremendous capacities, yet somehow we often lose touch with…
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What’s In A Name?
At the turn of the year, LinkedIn released the results of an analysis of over 85 million profiles looking for the most commonly used words and phrases. I will spare you the full results (you may remember the post from the twitter love it got at the time), but suffice to say that if you've…
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Humility
Fred Wilson tells the story in this extraordinary post of how his investment company, Union Square Ventures, missed the opportunity to invest in Airbnb, one of my favourite peer-to-peers. At the time, the founders had ideas but the service was still a marketplace for air mattresses on people's floors. It was, he says, the classic…