Embracing our inner weirdness
Easter. In the Christian calendar at least – and in the pagan one that preceded it – it’s supposed to be a time of rebirth. Yet rebirth of what? And into what, or whom? If it’s a more personal form…
Society
Efficient versus effective
What is ‘efficiency’? – in particular, ‘efficiency’ in any system that’s subject to real-world variances? Starting-point for this one was yet another passing item in my Twitterstream: RT @MentalHealthCop: If providers are contractually obliged to run hospitals at 98% capacity, is…
Managers, leaders and hierarchies
Is ‘manager’ the same as ‘leader’? Are leaders always managers? And are hierarchies – and, in particular, classic management-hierarchies – always a natural, necessary and unavoidable fact of (larger) enterprises? These questions came up for me whilst reading three articles…
Price, value, worth and cost
It didn’t look like much. Not worth much, certainly. It had been a gift from a friend, a former colleague: I’d had it for years, kept it reasonably safe in an old battered ring-case, until finally it was lost somewhere.…
The gift of a world
It’s heavy – that’s all I can tell at first. Slowly, carefully, I unwrap the present my great-niece has given me. It’s a small wooden box, with brass hinges and fastener, and with my name inlaid on top in green…
Business-models between for-profit and not-for-profit
Is money the only possible form of profit? And if not, what does that imply for design of business-models? – and, beyond that, to economics itself? This is one that I’ve been struggling with, both personally and professionally, for a…
Podcasts and videocasts – any requests?
Just a quick question – or request for priorities, perhaps. I’m at last getting my act together on doing podcasts and videocasts around my existing and future materials. The podcasts will probably be two to five minutes long, on any appropriate…
A kind of manifesto (short version)
Enterprise-architecture is dead; long live the architecture of the enterprise? Or something like that, anyway… Time for a kind of manifesto, I guess? As is perhaps too usual in my writing, the full-length version of the ‘manifesto’ ended up, uh, kinda long……
A kind of manifesto
Enterprise-architecture is dead; long live the architecture of the enterprise? Or something like that, anyway… So, what next? Time for a kind of manifesto, I guess? At the least, time for a fairly major paradigm-change in how we view the…
I’m sorry, but I just can’t afford it
Pray let me introduce you to a bleak, blunt fact of the futurist’s working-life: …where futurists work ain’t where the money is. In this so-called ‘economy’, where money drives everything and short-termism rules the roost, there’s almost no way to…
Pay, performance and the NHS
What can we do about the NHS – the UK’s National Health Service? Costs are spiralling, its IT failures are internationally infamous, and after several horrendous scandals, morale is at an all-time low. The British government knows exactly what to…
Dotting the joins (the JEA version)
[The new editor of the Journal of Enterprise Architecture, Len Fehskens, asked me to expand my previous post ‘Dotting the joins’ into a formal paper for the Journal. Which I did, and it was duly published in the August 2013…