Category: inspiration
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Bureaucracy
“Bureaucracy is a massive, role-playing game. If you’re an advanced player, you know how to deflect blame, defend turf, manage up, hoard resources, trade favors, negotiate targets and avoid scrutiny. Those who excel at the game, unsurprisingly, are unenthusiastic about changing it.”
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JFK Unsilenced
'On the 22nd of November 1963, on his way to deliver a speech at the Dallas Trade Mart, JFK, the voice of his generation, was silenced. But what if we could unsilence his voice? What if technology had advanced so much to
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Reflections on Writing a Book
I can hardly believe it but last week marked the one year anniversary of my book being published. Happily it seems to have done really well since launch, selling a lot more than I'd ever anticipated (it's very difficult to gauge what
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Learning from Improv
I love this quote from Miles Davies talking about jazz improvisation that Keith Sawyer uses in his post about how creativity is all about what you do afterwards: 'It’s not the note you play that’s the wrong note – it’s the note you
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Google Firestarters – Change and Complexity – The Event
For our recent Google Firestarters (our 26th!), we revisited a successful format that we first did two years ago. In 2015, in one of our most successful Firestarters ever, seven of the best minds in the industry gave a ten minute perspective in
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The Purpose of Life
'Ironically enough, when you make peace with the fact that the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather experience and growth, happiness comes as a natural byproduct. When you are not seeking it as the objective, it will find its way
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The Trust Equation
I was lucky enough to be in New York this week doing a workshop for a big pharma business and took the opportunity to catch up with Mark Raheja, founder of the brilliant August. In our conversation Mark mentioned a formula that
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Jeremy Bullmore on Insight
Thanks to Peter for pointing this out to me. A great thought on insight, numbers and words from the great Jeremy Bullmore: 'The origins of an insight are usually to be found in numbers. That's how we know an insight to be
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Pattern Interrupts and Creativity
Thanks to Faris for highlighting this extract from Tim Harford's Messy: Coincidentally, several days later Tim himself shared a link to this fascinating article on how Charles Darwin decided on the books he was going to read. The piece reports on some
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Genius Hesitates
In the brilliant Seven Brief Lessons on Physics which I'm reading right now (thanks to Inaki for the tip) there's a (very accessible) section explaining quantum theory. Building on the work of Max Planck, Einstein wrote a paper showing that light is