Category: trends
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The Extensible Self
I'm somewhat biased (since I curated it) but last Friday's Dots Conference, run by the smart folk at Brilliant Noise, was excellent. One of my favourites out of a whole bunch of inspiring and insightful talks came from Stuart Turner, founder of Robots and Cake, who talked about the transformational power of robotics. Stuart began…
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Why it’s Time to Ditch the Annual Performance Review
News came at the end of last month that Accenture were killing off performance reviews and rankings for their employees. They're not the first (Deloitte, Microsoft and Adobe have apparently done so too) but this was notable in being one of the largest companies by headcount (330,000) to do so. Good riddance I say. Performance…
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On The End of Apps (as we know them)
A while back Tom Goodwin wrote a great Techcrunch piece (the one with that opening line about Uber, Facebook, Alibaba and AirBnB that has been so frequently copied/quoted ever since), talking about how our relationship is increasingly shifting from the creators of products and even services to software interfaces that have become the new mediators. A new breed…
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The Future of Agencies
I'm currently conducting a major research project focusing on the future of agencies, working with Econsultancy. It's a revamp of the report I did three years ago on the same subject. As part of it I've been interviewing a large number of senior agency-side personnel from around the world working in all types of agency from the big…
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Organisational Structures from Scratch
Ashley Freidlein, CEO and Co-Founder of Econsultancy wrote a recent post on the Econsultancy blog as a first take answer to the question: 'With a blank sheet, what organisational structure would you choose for marketing and digital?'. It's an interesting question, and the answer he came up with incorporated a structure that brought improved customer…
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Google Firestarters Austin – Engineering Strategy – The Event
Saturday saw our first ever Firestarters event in Austin, held in the Google Fiber space during SXSWi. We'd themed the event around the intersection of user experience design and strategy which, judging from the audience feedback and debate on the night is rich territory for discussion right now. Perhaps unsurprising given the growth in importance…
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Mullet Strategy
21st Century Strategy from Neil Perkin The following is a notated version of a talk I gave last night at the APG Noisy Thinking event on 21st Century Strategy. When the APG asked me talk about '21st Century Strategy' I’d not long before read Emily Bell’s brilliant Hugh Cudlipp lecture about the future of journalism.…
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Google Firestarters Comes to Austin
I’m delighted to announce that Google Firestarters is coming to Austin. Firestarters has always been about combining the most compelling speakers with provocative debate around the most interesting industry issues amongst the most inquisitive and restless minds in strategy and planning. So it’s fitting that we’ll be taking that debate to the most well known…
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This Week’s Favourite Fraggl Links
Here are my favourite links from this week curated by Fraggl: Really like the look of Flow (above) – a programmable, wireless controller for computers and other connected devices that has raised over $270K on Indiegogo The guys at (friends of ODF) Storythings are launching a podcast which should be excellent. In the run up, they've put out a call for…
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Theologising Algorithms and Data
I read a lot of stuff that talks about how much of our present and future, particularly in the context of information and content discovery, are being governed by algorithms and I think we're in danger of overplaying their role. So this highly thought-provoking piece in The Atlantic by Ian Bogost made for an interesting read. Ian…