Category: trends
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With Great Data Comes Great Responsibility
I got back from holiday yesterday in time to witness the kerfuffle about Facebook's psychological newsfeed experiment (HT to this Quartz piece for the title to this post) which was a timely reminder of the sensitivities around the power that reach and data enable. The reality of-course is that most people have no idea about…
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The Quantified Employee
It seems that the practice of organisations using data and insights from personal tracking apps they have given to their employees (or encouraged them to sign up for) is in danger of becoming a thing. Yesterday I came across the FitBit corporate solutions page which offers 'flexible, scalable solutions to fit your budget and improve the…
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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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Gonzo Products
Gonzo products from Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino I saw a talk from Alexandra Deschamps Sonsino last year at Next Berlin which contained lots of good internet-of-things thoughts, and this short presentation just given at Future Everything 2014 is also good. I particularly liked the delineation between 'defensive innovation', 'careful innovation' and so-called 'gonzo innovation'. I'm in Manchester…
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Agility and Organisational Change
Agility and Organisational Change from Neil Perkin I've been doing a regular opening keynote for the Google Squared programme for well over a year, and more recently they asked if I would also run a session focused on organisational agility and change. This was pretty fortuitous as it gave me a chance to pull together…
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Agile is not a Process – it Defines a Culture
I’ve been reading Michael Sahota’s Agile Adoption and Transformation Survival Guide (from which the title of this post is taken) and finding myself nodding in violent agreement with much of its sentiment. The word ‘agile’ seems to be being applied all over the place in all sorts of contexts right now but I've long held that…
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A New Brand Of Marketing
Scott Brinker is one of my favourite writers on the convergence of marketing and technology. He has an excellent blog, and has just released a free (and at 40-odd pages, short) book on A New Brand Of Marketing. He defines this in the context of two overarching shifts – a broadening in the scope of…
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What Is Content Strategy?
I've just completed some work for Econsultancy researching and authoring a Best Practice Guide to Content Strategy. It was a fascinating piece of work, not least because content is such a growing area of focus for so many organisations right now, but also because the concept of Content Strategy remains relatively ill-defined. For a start,…
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Scaling Agile At Spotify
One of my favourite examples of an approach to scaling agile structures is detailed in this paper by Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson talking about Spotify's model of Tribes, Squads, Chapters and Guilds (in fact the guys at Undercurrent, whom I talk to below, link to it from their site). Spotify has scaled more rapidly than most…
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Holacracy at Undercurrent
I was fascinated to see a Tweet from Clay Parker Jones talking about how they had implemented Holacracy at Undercurrent. Holacracy intrigues me since it is such a disruptive idea that plays well to many of the things I bang on about here, and the guys at Undercurrent have been publishing some smart thinking around…