I spent my first afternoon at the allotment yesterday and it surprised me, in ways that I didn’t expect. I expected a patch of bare earth, in the midst of lots of other patches to be perhaps the definition of unsurprising, but I was wrong. It proved to be really...
Last week I was away from home, holidaying on the east coast and totally dependent on my phone for network connectivity for my iPad and Laptop. It got me thinking about the myriad times a photo would flow up and down that limited network connection. This post explores all of...
In a stunning display of innovation and polish Microsoft demonstrated it’s new devices strategy yesterday. It’s already shown it’s almost brutal determination to establish itself as a device agnostic services business over the past year, delivering apps on competing platforms ahead of it’s own, time and time again and Azure...
This post was first published on my business blog, which I’m closing down now that I’ve retired, so I’m archiving some of the better posts to this blog. Sometime you need to do whatever it takes; to go to extremes; to work seven days a week; work through the night;...
It’s appraisal time at work right now and it’s our custom to seek 360 degree feedback, which is starting to stream in. One recurring theme over the years has been that some of my work is too conceptual or theoretical and this makes it hard to directly implement. I’ve thought...
Over the last year I’ve used the Coach Me app on my iPhone and iPad to track all of the aspects of my life that I want to promote or prevent. For example I wanted to have more family meals and less high pain days, I wanted to spend more...
In recent years, especially in the USA, a few leading companies have introduced a policy of offering their staff ‘unlimited’ vacation time. At first this new policy innovation seems to have been greeted with enthusiasm, but it’s not turned out as well as expected. The intent seems to have been...
CSC hosts a regular series of Town Hall discussions which are streamed and available on demand, they are well worth watching (although the quality of Google hangouts leaves something to be desired). The latest of these discussions sought to answer the question “Is the PC dead?” which had a further...
We tend to think everything’s improving all the time, and that only grumpy old folks (like me) think things were better in the past. But with problems like information overload, the decline in conversation, obsession with smartphones and lots of other disruptive change it might be worthwhile to look back...
I’ve never been particularly impressed by the marketing that most companies do in the area that I work. It’s generally marketing the obvious, or desperately trying to find an interesting case study that we can polish up. Personally I’d rather dispense with the traditional marketing budget and let our expertise...