Mark Zuckerberg remarked at the launch of Facebook Watch, a Youtube style content video channel: “Watching a show doesn’t have to be passive. It can be a chance to share an experience and bring people together who care about the same things.” Thus at a stroke, he adopts for Facebook a couple of the strongest…

Daniel Kahneman is the father of behavioural economics for which he won a Nobel prize in 2002 for his revolutionary theories that challenged the idea that economics worked on the basis of humans being rational. He showed instead that economics really operates on the basis of dumb instinct. When I saw him speak (thanks to Rory Sutherland)…

Gillian Tett is the managing editor of FT. Last month she created a new acronym to explain to the world the continual surprises of the electoral results in the western world. FUCU. Tett wrote FUCU as a political analysis. A cynical analysis.  It led me to question whether FUCU might be a descriptor for marcomms too.…

Did you catch the headlines about women’s brain size earlier this month? It turns out that women’s brains are smaller than men’s.  This is not particularly startling as men are on the whole larger than women.  (Especially when they man-spread of course).  A new study from Erasmus University in Rotterdam claims that this correlates with…

Last summer Mats Alvesson and Andre Spicer published a book called “The stupidity paradox”. At a time when let’s face it many of us thought that we were having a summer of stupidity. Spicer and Alvesson’s book is not however about politics, elections or Brexit.  It is instead about organisational stupidity at work. They argue…

Cannes week saw the unveiling of the latest WARC survey on the future of strategy. Of course strategy itself doesn’t change in function. Richard Rumelt usefully defines it as discovering the crucial factors and designing a way to deal with them. Does 2017 change how you do that? If it hasn’t yet it should do.…

Not the printer. Not the presentation facilities. Not the air con now that summer has arrived. Your business model. Over 70% of venture capital and equity funding in the UK goes into developing tech; in excess of £9bn last year. The variety of innovation driving this investment demonstrated in June’s London Tech Week takes your…

20 years ago one man had his life’s effort trashed by a computer. One pundit wrote “the world champion found himself humbled by a 1.4-ton heap of silicone in a victory for IBM’s Deep Blue that marks a milestone in the progress of artificial intelligence. It is a depressing day for humankind in general” In…

“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run”. So says Amara’s Law, which we see repeatedly play out in nearly every new thing in media and marketing. It’s best illustrated by the annual Gartner Hype Cycle, which plots new tech every year…

Eve Poole, author of Leadersmithing and leadership coach, believes that one of the overriding qualities for leadership is manners.  Making others feel comfortable.  Faced with rudeness you should shame those people by perhaps saying “How Rude” loudly and beaming at them.  Or making eye contact and “shaming” them.  (Do try this in a media pub…

This week I experienced clown school. No, I have not had a lifelong ambition to don a red nose and big shoes.  Nor have I discovered a hitherto unknown love of slapstick. At a networking event for Rada for Business we had a taster of what clown school is like. One of the exercises involved…

It’s always a pleasure to watch Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy in full flow.  If you haven’t seen him speak, here’s a collection of his bon mots. Last time I saw him speak he was holding the ad industry to account for a lack of risk taking.  He said: “is the industry programmed to think too…