Category: Uncategorized
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If the Chinese invented everything, why didn’t they rule the world instead of Europe?
This is a fascinating short video featuring the science historian James Burke in which he explains a very convincing theory for why so many major inventions originated in China (often hundreds or even thousands of years before they became popularised in the West) and yet were never used in the way that Europeans used them.…
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Creativity from Constraints
Adam Morgan (of EatBigFish) has literally written the book on how constraints can catalyse creative or different thinking. He used a great example of this in his Firestarters episode which I recorded some months back. For the 2006 Le Mans race Audi were developing a brand new race car to take their performance at the…
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Writing changes how we think about the world
I came across this lecture by Larry McEnerney from the University of Chicago Writing Program over on LinkedIn and I got so much from it. Larry makes some wonderful points about writing better. He talks about how we’re taught to follow the rules of writing rather than thinking about how our writing can be valuable…
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QWERTY, and lessons on user-centric design
Why are keyboards set out in the way that they are? Why aren’t the letters in alphabetical order? It turns out that the answer to these questions reveals a brilliant piece of user-centric thinking. After some early attempts at creating writing machines which were less than user friendly, inventors Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel…
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Categorising Cognitive Bias
I’m not a behavioural science expert but I do think it provides a useful lens to consider when we’re trying to understand how people make decisions. One of the things I’ve always struggled with however, is how to navigate the long list of cognitive biases (there’s something like 150+ cognitive biases listed on the Wikipedia…
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Stocks and flows of knowledge
One way that I’ve found very useful to articulate how leaders can catalyse innovation in an organisation is to consider organisational knowledge in terms of ‘stocks and flows’. In economics and accounting a stock represents a quantity of something, measured at a specific time, but which may have accumulated over a period. Flows are measured differently, usually…
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On the application of A.I.
There’s so much breathless hype about A.I. going on right now, and so many examples of tools, prompts and ways of using it being shared that it can be difficult to separate signal from noise. The strategist in me wanted some way of capturing and categorising all the different potential applications for businesses to provide…
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Post of the Month – December 2021 – The Winner
Well it was a comparatively even vote this month with a strong showing for George Tannenbaum on the nature of work and Helen Edwards on brand blind spots but in the end it was Richard Huntington that won with his excellent post on his strategy journey. So well done to Richard who joins the hall…
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Neil Perkin – Book Recommendations
I tend to reference quite a few books in my travels/workshops/conversations, so I’ve put this page together to provide a list of the (non-fiction) books that I’ve found most useful in informing my (work) view on the world. My first recommendation (and possibly a way to short-cut the whole process) is to read my two…
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My Books
AGILE MARKETING: UNLOCK ADAPTIVE AND DATA-DRIVEN MARKETING FOR LONG-TERM SUCCESS My latest book Agile Marketing, published in 2022, is the definitive guide to transforming marketing structures, processes and culture, to be fit for purpose in today’s changeable environment. It covers how to put data at the heart of agility and performance, how to empower fast-moving…