Blog

Changing your mind

More from Rory Sutherland, this time on the benefits of business as a means for changing your mind: And herein lies one magic quality of business. It is the only area of human activity where you get paid to change your mind.In politics, in punditry, in academia, there is great value attached to consistency. Changing your mind risks loss of face. Your ability to deliver plausible generalisations...

Paving the cow paths

A good reminder of two things in this article in The Spectator: Things are so much better now than they were decades agoTry to rethink and improve, rather than just rehash In particular I learned the phrase: paving the cow paths which basically means automating something without actually thinking about whether it’s the right thing to do. The phrase’s origins appear to be: When the...

HubSpot post on chatbot strategy

Sometimes I worry about posts like this from HubSpot. The opening sentence references Gartner predicting that by 2020 customers will manage 85% of their enterprise relationships without interacting with a human… Interesting stat. Turns out it is from a brochure for a Gartner event in 2011: Which is not to say it isn’t true and accurate… perhaps it still is. But I’d love to...

Alcohol advertising

I wonder* how long it will be before alcohol advertising is banned in Australia – on television, radio, magazines, bill boards, bus shelters, online, etc. And further, how long before it is banned from TV shows in the form of regular activities (ie normalising). In Australia we banned tobacco advertising in 1976. The topic itself is complex, as are the costs to society. Part of the problem...

That’s all for WeWork for now

I’m just as sick of the WeWork shenanigans as you are I’m sure. So will make this my final (I hope) link to a WeWork story for a long, long time… “We have decided to postpone our IPO to focus on our core business, the fundamentals of which remain strong,” WeWork’s newly appointed co-CEOs Artie Minson and Sebastian Gunningham said on Monday. “The...

Revegetation on Lady Elliot Island

Such an encouraging story – about the regeneration of Lady Elliot island from pretty much a dustbowl, to a thriving ecosystem. Everything about this story is sooo good, from the initial plans of just planting trees, through to the goal self-sufficiency by this Christmas. However the real triumph is that it is possible for anyone to accomplish: “So, for me, let’s fix Lady Elliot...

My iPhone Home screen

Every so often I add a screenshot of my home screen – purely for fun when looking back in the years to come. Here it is as of 28 September 2019 – on my black iPhone SE running iOS 13.1

I use some iPhone wallpaper hacks from here.

Archives