Dotting the joins
Have we gone dotty? – all the way out to the level of the entire economy? And if we have, what can we usefully do about it? It’s a metaphorical question, of course – but perhaps not quite in the…
Society
At Social Business Summit London 2013
What’s the best way for businesses to engage with social-media? What are the successes, the traps and gotchas, the new ideas and innovations that work well, the old ideas that don’t? Those were some of the themes that Dachis Group’s…
Every organisation is ‘for-profit’
What’s the fundamental difference between a for-profit organisation, and a not-for-profit one? Or, for that matter, between either of those and, say, a government department, or an NGO (non-governmental organisation)? Short answer: none – because every organisation is a for-profit organisation. The only…
Extreme cooperation
If you were literally joined to someone else for life, how well would you cope? Over the past couple of days I’ve been watching one of the most inspiring television-documentaries I’ve ever seen: ‘Abby and Brittany: Joined for life‘. (The…
A Modest Proposal
After half a decade, the challenges and problems arising from the financial collapse of 2007-8 are still dragging on and on. With the economies of entire countries seemingly brought to their knees, and no apparent end in sight to any…
Everyday sexism of the subtler kind
How does sexism and suchlike become invisibly ingrained in our society? Answer: whenever said sexism is promoted as ‘progressive thinking’… To many people, the term ‘sexism’ applies only to gender-imbalance that directly affects women: yet a few moments thought should…
Anticlients are antibodies
Over the past few months I’ve built up quite a nice collection of what I call ‘anticlient‘ tweets: small complaints – or sometimes not so small – about how someone feels about their interactions with some organisation. Most organisations still…
“Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?”
“The world still reels from the fallout from the crisis of 2008 :: Who will lead us out of our uncertainty?” Those are the frame-captions for a cartoon-style advert that’s currently running on the Forbes website, for an upcoming conference…
Services, customers and citizens
If we provide a service that is a monopoly or natural-monopoly, how should we relate with those who use our services? What’s the most appropriate metaphor to use, to guide our decision-making? I’ve been thinking hard about this for quite…
Should companies go to jail?
Could companies go to jail? An odd-seeming question, I know, but I’ve been musing somewhat on the deeper implications of that strange legal fiction of ‘corporate person’… What started this off was that I went to the local HMV video-store,…
Four principles for a sane society: an addendum
What architectures do we need for a society and economics that’d be viable and sustainable over the longer term? And how do we scale that down to the the everyday work we do at present in enterprise-architectures and the like?…
Lessons from Lance – the future and Digital Doping
Recently several of us Gartner analysts were discussing the future of digitally enhanced humans. This covers a wide range from drugs that enhance cognition to prosthetics that enhance our physicality. With Lance Armstrong’s public fall from grace it is easy to see how artificial enhancement has infiltrated and tarnished professional sports. But I’m wondering about […]