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This week, Malcolm Gladwell joined the ranks of people yelling at workers to get back to work. Like many of the people arguing for a return to office work, they tell us they don’t believe it’s possible to do good work unless you are under management observation. It’s not in your best interest to work […]
Everything is becoming a subscription these days. The combination of convenient smaller regular payments for customers, and a recurring revenue-base for the provider means this model feels like the magic formula all around. Whether it’s kitchen appliances from AO, razors from Harry’s, food from Hello Fresh, or a car from Cazoo – you can enjoy […]
There are still some lessons from the fable of boiling a frog. I hardly dare repeat it, but the idea is that if you put a frog in boiling water, it will jump out. However, if you put it in cool water and gradually raise the temperature, the frog will not realise the danger and […]
This month I joined Octopus Deploy, and one of the things that everyone takes very seriously is quality online conversations. It makes sense that everyone should have a good experience during meetings in a remote-first company. I have been using a Sennheiser wired headset for the past two years, but this makes it difficult to […]
If you read more than twelve books a year, you will undoubtedly have had someone remark on it. “I don’t know where you find the time,” they say. “I don’t have time to read.” Of course, as the stoics keep telling us; our time is incredibly limited and all we can do is make good […]
As ancient fables go, The Boy Who Cried Wolf is certainly one of the big ones. For those who haven’t yet heard it, well done! Teachers love to tell this story in an attempt to instruct students on morals, though this is misguided as the story may increase a child’s propensity to lie (NurtureShock: New […]
Following on from my article on working with public coronavirus data where I calculated the original peak in the UK to have been an estimated 50,000 cases per day (not the recorded 6,000 cases per day)… the most common follow up questions (aside from predictions on what will happen next) are about timings. What is […]
The full title of this article should really be “Increase Productivity by Quantifying Simple Tasks; Protect Complex Task Productivity by Not Quantifying It”. This is the result of a study by Aruna Ranganathan, co-authored by Alan Benson, that studied workers in a garment factory and I’ve added my opinion because sometimes I’m a narcissist like […]
Full credit to Geoffrey Moore, whose seminal Crossing the Chasm keeps proving to be a useful book thirty years after it was written. Credit also to Hans Baumhardt who introduced me to the book and who critically shaped my thinking about work and life. What I hope do, now that the credits are over, is […]
Every organisation has to deal with this problem. It has been described in many different ways, including the famous quaductionism of “Urgent vs Important” to the simplicity of phrases like “firefighting”. Yes, it’s all those tasks that people seem to want now, which are stopping you from doing the real work. My analogy for this […]