Versatile Amphibian

Like many people I found myself in a buying panic on Black Friday. I havered over some wireless headphones, or a VR headset for the PS4 I don't have time to play, or an Amazon Echo but somehow couldn't bring myself to make a decision. In the end my Amazon basket contained only one item: Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader. So I bought that and was left with faintly unsatisfied with my Black Friday efforts. I shouldn't have been. Although a little dry, this is a really superb book on disruptive leadership in a time of colossal social and technological change. Although perhaps not so well known (seems that great strategists tend to be less popular than charismatic characters, see Montgomery vs Slim, Patton vs Abrams), Guderian was a revolutionary. He invented Blitzkrieg, amongst other things. A couple of ideas have particularly caught my attention in the early chapters, which I thought worth sharing. 1. Organising disruptive capabilities One of Guderian's key realiza...

I feel like I've recently been on a crusade against business analysis. As some of you will know I really, really like to prove things so I am most certainly in favour of analysis, my problem is the amount of it that people feel that they need to do in order to make a decision. And worse still, having asked for lots of data and analysis it then goes on a shelf without being read. I've been trying to change that situation within our practice, project by project. Part one of my crusade is to persistently remind people that analysis must ultimately help someone make a decision and then enact that decision in the world. That may seem banal, but my observation is that it's very easy for analysis to become the task, subsuming the intention of the strategy process. This leads to intellectually pure answers, but not decisions. Part two is more recent. It's the culmination of something that's been nagging at me since we started to build ventures for clients, initially usi...

I’ve recently become fascinated with the potential of domestic voice assistants, such as Amazon’s Echo. Although they have their flaws of interpretation, they enable access to content from the internet for people who are unused to, or unable to use smartphone interfaces. It’s easy to forget that although a great many people pick up their iPhone as soon as they wake up and rarely put it down until they close their eyes at night, there’s a whole generation my parent’s age and above who don’t habitually carry their phone around or really understand how to use it. Devices like Echo/ Alexa get around this by making it easy to get facts about things from the web or play some music just by speaking clearly, bringing some of the benefits of ubiquitous connectivity without the learning curve. Xperia Agent expresses its frustration at its long gestation I was therefore excited to see how Sony were getting along with their Xperia Agent, AI assistant product, which they sh...

Last week I was lucky enough to present the keynote at Oracle Modern Business conference in London. I used it to test some thinking that's emerged from client work over the last few years. I've been gathering data around it and applying the ideas in real businesses... needless to say that there's some promise there. The central thought is that dinosaurs were once unicorns. Rather than the common rhetoric that the latter are intrinsically better than the former, I wonder whether unicorns should actually aspire to be dinosaurs and seek to learn from them in the same way that big organisations seem desperate to sip some unicorn-flavour Koolaid in the Valley. Anyhow, here's the transcript of my speech. Hope you find it interesting. Disruption was an exciting new concept when I started my career. It was much like Lean Startup is today: if you felt that you understood it, you were in an exclusive club possessing of knowledge that could topple empires. Disruption is dar...