Accountability is a two-way street. When you have committed to what you will do and I have committed to what I will do we are able to hold each other accountable for what we have to do. So far so good. But if we leave it till the end of the task to follow up [...]
Just about every board-game is developed around a simple principle. We love a sense of progress and are bothered by setbacks. We get a kick out ascending a ladder and are frustrated by having to slide down a snake. Dr Anna Tarrant from whom I took the illustration has used this principle quite creatively in [...]
You stand on a platform 15 stories above an icy ocean, filled with floating debris, twisted steel and patches of burning oil. It is chaos down there. And yet you jump! Whatever would make you do this? Well, the deck on which you are standing is ablaze and your boots are melting. There is urgency. [...]
A while ago I watched the Top Gear rerun in which Richard Hammond drove a 1963 Opel Kadett called ‘Oliver’ across the wildest terrain in Botswana. The team crossed the Makgadikgadi pan; a thin crust of clay over mush where to stop is to lose your vehicle. They took on rough dirt roads and soft [...]
Ducati Corse entered the Grand Prix motorcycle circuit for the first time in 2003. As newcomers on the circuit their strategy was to acquire knowledge in order to develop a better bike for future seasons. They fitted their bikes with sensors to capture data and the riders were debriefed after every race to get input [...]
Perspective Are you (tired of) driving with one foot on gas and the other on the brake? Here is a drawing of the chair on which I sit to work. To be precise, it is a drawing of what the chair isn’t. A drawing of the negative shapes around the chair. When my first art teacher, [...]
Here is a drawing of the chair on which I sit to work. To be precise, it is a drawing of what the chair isn’t. A drawing of the negative shapes around the chair. When my first art teacher, Nicholas Galloway, gave this class he said “this will change the way you see the world [...]
“A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.” ― Truman Capote While I would hesitate to argue with a writer of the stature of Truman Capote, good conversation is rich and complex and is based on more than intelligence, [...]
Perspective: So what is strategy (actually) We all know those two clichés about the elephant, the first about its encounter with some blind men (1,190,000 hits in Google) and the second about it being in the room (69,700,000 hits). The reason sayings become cliché is that they highlight truths in such a compelling way that, for [...]
Robert McNamara, one of Harvard’s most famous MBAs spelled out the following approach to military strategy: “We must first determine what our foreign policy is to be, formulate a military strategy to carry out that policy, then build the military forces to successfully conduct this strategy”. This was the classic case study approach to strategy. [...]
