Versatile Amphibian

I sat in on an interview with Danny Cohen at the RTS last night. The topic was the future of the BBC and there were a few nuggets on channels, iPlayer and the BBC online that I felt like sharing. Here goes: Channels still have relevance In general, channels are still important - people are launching them rather than shutting them down. The BBC will also be using iPlayer to create permanent channels for their big brands, like Radio 1 and pop-up channels for big events like Wimbledon, Glastonbury and the Proms. Program moves will continue to occur - for example Great British Bake Off is moving from BBC 2 to BBC 1 - even though it regularly hits a 7 million audience on the former, Danny believes that the shift to 1 will boost that audience even further. Even in a digital, multi-platform world the channel brand and EPG position is an important factor in people's decisions about what to watch. He gave the example of Andy Murray tennis matches, which sometimes start on 2 and move t...

It’s a tough decade to lead a major corporation or government. Things are changing so fast and the macroeconomic situation is so complex that it’s no surprise the finger gets pointed at Managers whenever things go wrong. The travails of new leaders at Nokia and now RIM and Yahoo have also placed scrutiny on the selection criteria for Managers. It’s possibly because of this that there’s been an upsurge in research around a-periodical systems as a way of selecting leaders at all levels of organisations. Typically, this research is aimed at governmental systems and since “a-periodicity” is really a fancy way of saying “random”, the governmental system has come to be known as a “randomocracy”. Partly because I love the name and partly because I’m really interested in the practice of leadership in a digital, millennial business environment, I’ve been thinking about some randomocracy ideas could be applied to business management. Random acts of kindness – the pure randomocracy A pure r...