Reading Time: 2 minutes Prisoners of Geography This book was a massive “AHA” moment for me: rivers, mountains, seas, plains, boundaries and why they mean, almost everything. Shoe Dog I’ll never look at a pair of Nikes the same way again. A business non-fiction that reads like a novel. A great real life tale combining sports and business entrepreneurship … More My Top 6 Books of 2018
Reading Time: 2 minutes The end of the year is a great time for real reflection, which can actually be surprisingly powerful in learning and developing (whether you define that as being better at work, at home being happier or more fulfilled etc). Sure you say, I know that and I’ll reflect at some point, on the train home … More 20 Questions to Reflect Professionally and Personally on 2018
Reading Time: 5 minutes Wiser – how group decisions can let us down 50 years since the term “groupthink” was first coined it is still alive and well in the corridors of power in government, business, finance and elsewhere. This readable book by Cass Sunstein & Reid Hastie systematically unpicks the aspects of human nature that can lead … More 15 Things that changed my perspective so far this year
Reading Time: 3 minutes Authors Cass Sunstein and Reid Hastie have put together an excellent and readable taxonomy of the “bugs” that can afflict group decision making and cause groups to blunder in their book Wiser. In the first part of this blog I discussed their dissection of the causes of group decision making failure. How can we make … More [Books] Wiser (part 2) – getting past groupthink to better outcomes
Reading Time: 7 minutes So this is about strategies and tactics to understand and get past I am right you are wrong type situations and get to better outcomes. Specifically I am going to address this through three vignettes. But before we start I’d like to ask you to picture a recent example of a disagreement. I’m sure you can … More I am right, you are wrong…
Reading Time: 5 minutes Why a Focus on Personality Matters Fascinating insights from Deloitte and Harvard Business Review helped me understand the role of personality in workplace interactions, and allowed me to re-interpret my relationships with colleagues and peers more productively volatilityviewpoint.w… Ray Dalio’s Principles Embrace reality and deal with it. Fail well. Understand that tension is key … More Top 2017 Reads: Blogs, Articles, Books & Podcasts that changed my perspective in 2017
Reading Time: 6 minutes Sure, Ray Dalio is well known for his approach to “radical transparency” and the uncompromising way he has implemented that (as well as the extraordinary investment success of his firm, Bridgewater), but his recent book Principles held learnings for me in a number of unexpected areas including: mistakes and failure , the art of disagreement … More Five unexpected learnings from Ray Dalio’s Principles
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last weekend we spent a fascinating two days at the Bio-hackers summit at a disused power station on the outskirts of Helsinki. A number of people have already asked me what my main takeaways were so I wanted to get some of them down straight away before memory fades too much, hopefully I’ll add to … More Two Days with Biohackers
Reading Time: 4 minutes McKinsey just published an excellent and comprehensive paper covering how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can deliver real value for business. tl;dr The only issue – at 80 pages it’s a lot to read. A lot of the use cases focus on retail, energy and education, one angle I find particularly are the read-across of these examples into … More One minute guide to real-world AI implementation
Reading Time: 4 minutes It’s good to reflect, like many of you I spend a lot of time looking forwards, setting goals, moving forward, thinking about what we’re going to achieve. That’s what gets you far, but I’ve learnt it’s also important to look back, see how far you’ve come. That gives motivation, helps push on through the inevitable … More Five years as part of a small team doing important work
