The Strategy Blog.
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Is it time to pour the tea yet?
12 months ago Kathryn Jacob and I published The Glass Wall: success strategies for women at work and businesses that mean business (Profile Books). Since publication we have given over 50 talks in companies in many sectors ranging from the civil service to banking via media companies and the entertainment…
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Can robots be brave?
How do you win big at the upcoming Awards, where the final round of judging is imminent? The judges will surely be looking for brave work. Brave work that innovates. That breaks the mould. That shatters existing preconceptions. Robots can’t deliver this, only people can. As more and more tasks are taken…
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Mur de Verre
In the months since the Cannes Advertising festival in June I have been mulling over the state of our industry. As a self-proclaimed champion of diversity in senior management, how was gender diversity represented there this year? I wasn’t staying in Cannes so needed cabs to and from my out…
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Diversity of thinking
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…
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Them and Us
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…
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Fragmentation and distrust in elections and consumer marketing
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…
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Debunking myths
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…
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Stupid
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…
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The future of strategy is synthesis
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…
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If it ain’t broke it soon will be
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…
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Man v Machine
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…
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Once more with meaning
“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…
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