February 2011
2 posts
“Khanna tells us, point blank, “pretending the world should be equal – or even...”
– http://www.paragkhanna.com/?p=1269
“But although this ought to be an opportunity for financial services providers,...”
– http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2011/02/07/millennials-and-money/
November 2010
2 posts
Immigration and wealth
The Human Development Report rankings have come out, placing the U.S. 4th, behind Norway, Australia, and New Zealand.
3 of the top 4, with Norway the odd man out, are immigrant nations.
via The Atlantic
“In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in...”
– The Crossroads Nation - NYTimes.com
October 2010
2 posts
On chaordic leadership
Never hire or promote in your own image. It is foolish to replicate your strength. It is stupid to replicate your weakness. Employ, trust, and reward those whose perspective, ability and judgment are radically different from your own and recognize that it requires uncommon humility, tolerance, and wisdom.
Dee Hock, quoted in a comment on HBR
The six keys to achieving excellence
1. Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance.
2. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have...
September 2010
2 posts
“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he...”
– Arthur C. Clarke via Seth Godin
August 2010
8 posts
The Wilderness Downtown →
Simply amazing.
I'd buy a Kindle if...
If Amazon really think that e-books are the future, why don’t they include a free download of the e-book with every hardcopy bought?
Then those of us who are (still) attached to physical books would be incentivised to buy a Kindle to try it out…and pretty soon might realise that actually we’re happy to tend to a virtual bookshelf?
A matter of perspective
A father on Christmas Eve puts into one son’s stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son’s, a pile of horse manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, “Dad, I just don’t know what I’ll do with this watch. It’s so fragile. It could break.” The other boy runs to him and says, “Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!”
via The...
Cool Tools: The Best Magazine Articles Ever →
Wow.
Reading sorted until 2012.
““Privacy was once free. Publicity was once ridiculously expensive.
“Now the...”
– Sam Lessin (via Jeff Jarvis)
“Before, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy,...”
– Jeff Bezos talking to Charlie Rose
July 2010
3 posts
Design Thinking - the tail that wags the dog?
Reading is Design Thinking Killing Creativity over at the Future Lab, the following paragraph jumped out
In the 5 or so years since design thinking got big in the boardroom, I’ve experienced, over and over again, business ROI getting the better of design thinking. Awesome product propositions anchored by critical insight, technology, and business potential, gets killed or watered down ...
“In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among...”
– Are You Illiterate If You Don’t Know How to Program?
I understand their sentiments but I believe that this is imbalance happens with every revolutionary new technology. Early users of the printing press had to have an intimate technical understanding of the process, rather than just being able to...
Is it just B2B businesses that have to create a...
Interesting article from John Sviokla over at FutureLab, however I think he simplifes the B2C world.
By and large, in B2C firms, the primary task is to automate and scale cognitive work.
He sets this against B2B business:
The core of B2B work is about coordination, collaboration and creative problem solving — not codification and scaling.
This is the core process in B2B work because...
June 2010
8 posts
“It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either...”
– Why I Returned My iPad - Peter Bregman - Harvard Business Review
Starting a new social tool in the post-Facebook...
A friend pointed me towards Pearltrees, a new visual social bookmarking tool.
The problem that I have with these sites is that I already use Delicious which is very similar. So unless a newcomer offers an ‘import’ feature they will struggle to convince me to switch. However, from their POV, the more open the architecture, the lower the switching costs facing their users when someone...
Why you should re-cycle your phone →
Hardware is now a commodity. The differentiation...
Accenture have an interesting report on ‘Next Movers’, organisations that are looking to push beyond the initial scope of connected devices (PC and mobile) to cars, energy systems, appliances and even toys
Adding networking to a device it is not your usual bell or whistle. Instead, it is a transformational act that goes to the heart of the device’s value...
Supperclubs - the end of the amateurs?
It seems that the spirit of the underground is hard to maintain.
From Studio East in the still-under construction Westfield to the Friday Food Club it is clear that the era of the enthusiastic amateur is being replaced by professionalism and corporate experience in the supper club world.
Supper clubs or underground / pop up restaurants took off last year as enterprising amateur chefs took...
“In France, firing a printing plant employee is hugely expensive. The gent is...”
– Le Monde on The Brink | Monday Note
Wow! And we thought UK plc was in a dire state?!
2 tags
Have we reached the tipping point for the mobile...
Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research
This presentation from Morgan Stanley certainly suggests that 2010/11 may be when the internet becomes divorced from ‘computers’ and just becomes an expected feature.
The implications of this are clear - the gap between online and offline will continue to shrink, social networking and location based apps will continue their...
May 2010
3 posts
3 tags
Consu-ME-ism
In a world of virtually limitless choice, the act of consuming becomes a statement of identity rather than the satisfaction of basic needs. Consumer spending remains driven by desire for status as always but the source of that status has drifted from a straightforward price-value relationship. Consumers have their own perspectives that govern perceived status depending on their priorities and...
Home ownership and mobile society
Is home ownership going to go the same way as a job for life, fondly remembered as a relic of the 20th century industrial era?
For:
Owning your own home made sense when people could hope to hold a job for most or all of their lives. But in an economy that revolves around mobility and flexibility, a house that can’t be sold becomes an economic trap, preventing people from moving freely to...
Older Generations Turning To Entrepreneurship -... →
Fuelled by the rise in Minipreneurs, increased ease of remote and freelance working, this is one trend that’s only going to get bigger as baby boomers approach retirement age with the money, time and energy to make up for all those years at the corporate watercooler.
April 2010
17 posts
Has the death of the TV-industrial complex been...
Interesting to see Microsoft and Google advertising Bing and Chrome via mainstream media - print, billboards and TV slots.
Is this is a recognition that power of the TV-industrial complex remains significant, and that the mass market will not be reached solely through ‘new media channels’ - e.g. word of mouth, having a better product and other such revolutionary post-industrial...
A response to 'The Abiding Tyranny of Male...
Interesting post on HBR about the continuing low prevalence of women in various leadership positions.
However the author was very selective about which stats to show (Fortune 500 CEO’s, Army generals, members of congress). These are all roles which fit into
the modern model of leadership…requiring “unfailing availability and total geographical mobility,” [which] is...
How change happens
I’ve been thinking a bit about how change permeates into people’s lives and it seems that there’s a pretty consistent pathway:
Technological => Economic => Social => Cultural
Now this isn’t a strict hierarchy, and it omits important lenses (political and legal?), but the basic route of innovation often broadly follows the above pattern.
Innovations originate...
“In a recent study, “From Predators to Icons,” the French scholars...”
– Malcom Gladwell ‘The Sure Thing’ - New Yorker 18/01/2010
(subscription needed)
While their analysis might hold true at the moment of large scale capital accumulation, this is a fundamentally zero-sum view, with little appreciation of the concept of value creation
“Well, I thought it would be instructive to go back and look at a couple of...”
– Warren Buffett in The Snowball to a celebrated group of tech entrepreneurs before the bubble burst.
An interesting perspective from an investor’s point of view about how sometimes it’s easier to spot who stands to lose out from particular trends than to pick the winners.
Too soon?
Pete Cashmore of Mashable fame has written ‘Group buying: A billion-dollar Web trend?’ about how investors are rushing to Groupon and similar companies as ‘the next big web trend’.
I was reminded of Letsbuyit.com from the first tech bubble which operated on similar lines until it ran out of funds.
But rather than analyse the current prospects of Groupon (of course...
Response to "The Paradise That Should Have Been"
Just read The Paradise that Should Have Been, an impassioned but ultimately flawed critique of the economics of online music services.
The calculations overlook that creating a song isn’t like ‘traditional’ paid labour – in that musicians can earn passive income from their labour - i.e. revenue output is independent of time input
The author should read Kevin Kelly’s Better than Free for some...
Away with tax! Abolish the lot (except one)
Reading Kit Malthouse’s Times op-ed about replacing all taxes with a single consumption tax.
Companies, for instance, don’t actually pay tax, you pay it for them when you buy their goods or services; they just price in tax as another overhead. All that national insurance, corporation tax and even the income tax of their employees forms part of the price of everything you buy, with VAT on...
The Comeback Country - How America pulled itself... →
Reading The Comeback Country echoed my thoughts in a previous post on Thomas Friedman’s pessimistic article on the imminent loss of America’s competitive advantage.
A major caveat to the article should be that while a clean-tech boom might be about to create a wave of new jobs, this is not going to be in the same way that the internet unleashed a generation of Ebay entrepreneurs.
...
Morozov asked, in passing, whether the Net
might be promoting a certain (hedonism-based) ideology that may actually push [people] further away from any meaningful engagement in politics?” That strikes me as a profoundly important question, and one worthy of more discussion. The most important political effect of the Net may lie in the subtle ways it reshapes our personal and social lives...
Entrepreneurs, immigrants and job creation →
Thomas Friedman’s op-ed piece in the NYT made a compelling case for the links between job creation, startups and immigration.
One statistic caught my eye:
“Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less…that means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”
My emphasis - incredible...
“Fred Wilson:
“The only systemic risk the VC business is creating for...”
– Venture Capital Creating Systemic Risk? - StartupTalk
Are the financial services industries going to be transformed by technology and Web 2.0?
“I don’t think of my life as a career,” he says. “I do stuff. I...”
– Steve Jobs being interviewed by Steven Fry for Time magazine
Apple iPad Launch: Will Steve Jobs’ Magic Touch Return? - TIME
3 tags
Malcom Gladwell on Social Media
Malcom Gladwell explains his lack of social media presence here.
He explains that he thinks the ease of organisation leads to a lack of engagement, and that the superficiality of connections ultimately weakens its power.
But his most interesting point concerns the potential longevity of social media:
If you’re looking for milestones, that would sound to me like a tipping point-ish type of...
