Category: strategy
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How to innovate like Amazon
I spent a few days with Diageo’s European leadership team in Dublin recently and whilst there I saw a talk from Amazon’s supply chain lead Marcus Mallon who talked about how the company innovate. Amazon are of course known for their customer obsession and ‘working backwards’, their relentless experimentation and openness to fail, and for combining a long-term…
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Winning the race before it starts
I featured a case study in my most recent newsletter which focused on the theme of changing how the game is played – learning from sports, culture and business examples where the protagonist had flipped the script to rethink norms and gain unprecedented advantage. The example was the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, and it’s…
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Technology, functional drift, and collective blind spots
I recently came across a news article which reported that Health New Zealand, the primary publicly funded body set up by the New Zealand government to oversee their healthcare system was using a single Excel spreadsheet to track $28 Billion of public money. An independent report by Deloitte found that the reliance on a single spreadsheet to…
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The Agentic Organisation (redux)
I really believe that AI agents are going to upend everything from organisation design, to strategy formulation and execution, to workflows, to how we interact with data, to how people get stuff done. It’s going to bring such fundamental change that we need to start thinking now about how we can take a more deliberate…
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Why critical thinking is even more important in the age of AI
I was really struck by this post from Dr Philippa Hardman who has done a fantastic job of reviewing five recent studies on the impact of Gen AI on learning. Many have hailed the potential of generic LLM tools in supporting learning but as Dr Phil points out, an increasing body of research suggests that generic AI…
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Brands, and Latent Space
Reading Jack Smyth’s reflections on the recent BRXND Marketing x AI conference in LA I came across the idea of ‘latent space’ as it relates to brands and LLMs. I confess I’d not heard the term before so I did some digging to find out more about what it means, and I think it’s a…
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What Darwin, Faraday and Wollstonecraft teach us about navigating an overwhelming world
I’ve been listening to Human Intelligence, a wonderful podcast from the BBC which features short (15 minute) episodes focusing on ‘brilliant thinkers with 50 stories that celebrate the human mind’. Like one of it’s subject thinkers Socrates, Human Intelligence is concerned with how people think rather than what they think, and I loved the way that they organised an impressive…
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On the Agentic Organisation
The next wave of AI innovation is already upon us, and it’s the era of agentic AI. In fact, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has already said that ‘agentic’ will be the word of 2025. The pace of progression has been remarkably fast from simple chatbots that were primarily designed to engage in conversation, answer questions,…
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On misinterpreting the diffusion of innovations curve
The diffusion of innovations curve, developed by Everett Rogers, has become a pretty iconic tool in understanding how new ideas, products, or technologies gain traction within a market. Its simplicity is compelling: a bell curve that categorises adopters (or a population) into five groups — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Yet,…
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Using GenAI in strategy, research and insight
Last week I ran a virtual version of the Advanced Application of AI in Advertising course that I put together for the IPA. One of the key topic areas is about how to use GenAI tools in the strategy and planning process which I think is an endlessly shifting but fascinating topic. I genuinely think that integrating…