Category: insight
-
Google Firestarters Episode 3: Sue Unerman
I'm really happy to say that the third Google Firestarters video chat is now up. This one is with the brilliant Sue Unerman who was wonderfully erudite, funny and insightful. We talk about a wide range of subjects related to the industry including thoughts on implementing agile processes in an agency, continuous learning in life…
-
Google Firestarters Episode 2: Lindsay Pattison
I'm delighted to announce episode 2 in our series of Google Firestarters chats – this one with the brilliant Lindsay Pattison, Chief Client Officer, WPP. The conversation with Lindsay was pretty wide-ranging but she had some fascinating thoughts around how the old delineation between agency types and roles is now less meaningful and about the…
-
Learning from Football
I really liked this post from Chris Dillon on what football can teach us. He makes several great points talking about how great teams are the product of how the component parts (the players) collectively work together and how you can't read the properties of a collective simply from its individual elements. A great team…
-
Complexity Bias, and Looking for Answers in the Wrong Places
I was thinking the other day about complexity bias, which Shane Parrish has described as: ‘…our tendency to look at something that is easy to understand, or look at it when we are in a state of confusion, and view it as having many parts that are difficult to understand.’ Counter-intuitively we often prefer to…
-
Future-Back
I've done some backcasting before now in my work with clients but I liked the way this is framed in this article in terms of how most leaders think 'present-forwards' rather than 'future-back' 'Present-forward leaders build their organizations in increments, following the rules and procedures that work today. Future-back leaders, in contrast, visualize what their…
-
The Problem With Behavioural Economics
Last Friday in between calls I dipped in and out of the brilliant Nudgestock (you can see all the talks over on the Ogilvy Consulting YouTube channel). A favourite talk that I caught from the day came from Bri Williams early on. One of the biggest challenges with behavioural economics (for me at least) is…
-
Wardley’s Universal Doctrine
I'm a fan of Simon Wardley's thinking – he did an excellent Google Firestarters talk a few years ago, and I drew on some of his work in my first and second book. His approaches to understanding situational context and strategy with Wardley Mapping are exceptional. The doctrine have been described as value-based ideas and…
-
Bias to Action
Richard Shotton makes a great point in this post about why marketers so often overemphasise chasing the latest fads at the expense of more established activities. A good part of the reason for this, he says, is demonstrated by a study that was made into (of all things) penalty shoot outs in football: 'In 2007…
-
Some Advice on Doing Your Own Thing
Unbelievably it’s now ten years since I left corporate world and took the leap to do my own thing. Over that time I’ve often been asked by people who are about to take the leap themselves or who have just made the jump to give them some tips on what to expect and how to…
-
Google Firestarters 33 – Thinking Differently
Next Monday evening in London we have our next Planning Google Firestarters event and I'm particularly excited about this one since for a good while I've been wanting to focus an event on how perspectives from outside the industry can inform or challenge the practice of planning. I'm a big believer in the value of…