Getting sense out a rental-car company can be hard: now try it when the person at the other end of the line doesn’t speak the same language… Travelling in Portugal is ‘interesting’, often in the classic Chinese sense… 🙁 My …
In the damp spaces of the days, when I can’t play tourist, I’ve been hacking at content for a book I’ve been brewing for a couple of years now: Mythquake. Basic idea is straightforward: there’s a direct metaphor between tectonic …
“…normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.” (Not there is a ‘normal’ service on this station, anyway. 🙂 ) Which summarises, really, the difficulty of running a weblog on the road in a foreign country where I barely …
Been networking hard in the other sense over the past couple of days, at the TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework) enterprise architecture practitioners conference in Lisbon. More later when I’ve had a chance to rest 🙂 but some good …
Been offline for a few days with an annoying DNS problem (my mistake, ultimately :-{), but came across a brilliant if disturbing article by Henry Porter in London’s “The Independent”: We’re all Suspects Now [behind paywall]. Mainly about the steady …
Perhaps the bleakest dichotomy of all: the physics definition of ‘power’ is “the ability to do work”, whereas most social definitions are more like “the ability to avoid work”… Therein lies perhaps the most serious problem for organisational effectiveness: which …
One of my main peeves about standard business strategy-frameworks like the Business Rules Group’s Business Motivation Model is that they start way too far down, as if the organisation is the sole centre of the world. The framework I use …
Returning to England, I’m delighted to see Common Ground have been at it again: this time a magnificent new tome, “England In Particular: a celebration of the commonplace, the local, the vernacular and the distinctive”, Sue Clifford, Angela King and …
My old colleagues at the former Australian Foresight Institute have a futures conference coming up in Melbourne next weekend, 20-22 October: see AusForesight.com . Highlight of the conference is a free public forum with Richard Neville, 22 October, 1pm-4.30pm. Richard’s …
Everyone in business knows about SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. But to me it’s always seemed clumsy and unnecessarily combative – especially Weaknesses and Threats. So here’s my suggestions for an alternative acronym: SCORE. Strengths, Systems and Services that …