Category: Uncategorized
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The Steinway System
In New York in 1919 a young copywriter working at N.W. Ayer was handed an account that few others in the agency wanted to work on. The copywriter, Raymond Rubicam, was asked to write three full page magazine advertisements for Steinway & Sons. The piano maker had long thought that advertising was somewhat beneath them.…
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Cognitive Surrender
Helen Edwards from the Artificiality Institute tells the story of the researcher who, before LLMs came along, read every transcript of every interview he had ever done. He handed that job to an AI and then mid-presentation he had to stop because he realised that he couldn’t speak to any of it. The analysis might have been…
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Thinking (and working) in loops
In early June Peter Steinberger, the developer behind OpenClaw, posted (on X, but I’m not linking to X) something which seems to have changed a lot of influential people’s approaches to working with AI. ‘Here’s your monthly reminder’, he said, ‘that you shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore. You should be designing loops that prompt…
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The Hidden Costs of AI
A couple of months ago the Oxford academic Carl Benedikt Frey wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times arguing that, as the application of AI becomes increasingly ubiquitous, more tasks that were once handled by professionals or businesses will shift onto consumers. This, noted Frey, is not a new phenomenon. The washing machine may have…
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Strategists, AI and the Edge Effect
In 1933 the American naturalist Aldo Leopold set out a principle which shaped decades of wildlife management. His ‘law of interspersion’ noted that wildlife species that required different types of food and cover thrived where distinct habitats intersected. Animals that required more than one thing to survive concentrated in the areas where those requirements were…
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How Data Won the Premier League
In 2015, Liverpool Football Club hired Jürgen Klopp as their new manager. It was a decision that was met with scepticism by many pundits. During Klopp’s last season at Borussia Dortmund the side had dropped to the bottom of the Bundesliga. But Liverpool had seen something that the pundits had missed. Dr Ian Graham, the…
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When efficiency is not enough
I suspect that this point of view may be somewhat against the current zeitgeist towards AI-driven productivity, but I do believe that there is such a thing as too much efficiency. A good example of this happened in 2011 when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan, and Toyota’s supply chain was hit…
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Using AI to transform client relationships
A couple of weeks ago I ran the first IPA Advanced AI for Account Handlers course and alongside all the more obvious automations and efficiency gains from AI there were some specific techniques we focused on that have much wider application. For strategists, consultants, and anyone interested in how AI can transform managing clients and…
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Why is Corporate AI Innovation so Hard?
One of the themes I keep coming back to in my workshops on AI, emerging technology and managing change is the risk of looking at the new through the lens of the old. Of getting stuck in optimising existing systems or ways of thinking, and neglecting the opportunity that comes from reinventing and rethinking at a more…
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Why good ideas die and how to save them
This week I was running a three day workshop with a group of leaders from an education foundation on the topic of connecting strategy through to execution. We got on to the topic of innovation and began discussing Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The talented group of engineers, computer programmers and scientists that came…