Google Firestarters #4

The fourth Firestarters event,  hosted by Google and curated by Neil Perkin, was themed around entrepreneurship and maker culture. The invite had the following quote attached: “Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Howard Stevenson, Harvard Business School This rather optimistic and aspirational definition was perfectly embodied by the three speakers. Each came from a [...]

Data should be used as evidence and not illustration

I read the Guardian article on journalist’s struggles with “data literacy” with interest. The piece concentrates on inaccurate reporting through a lack of understanding of numbers, and the context around them. “Honest mistakes”, of a sort. Taken more cynically, it is an example of a fallacy that I see regularly in many different  disciplines (I’m [...]

Google Firestarters: The New Operating System For Agencies

Firestarters #3, hosted by Google and curated by Neil Perkin, featured three fascinating and provocative presentations from Mel Exon, Martin Bailie  and James Caig on “The New Operating System For Agencies” Each of the three talks had slightly different emphases: • Mel posited that brands need to be useful, entertaining and epic, and so should its [...]

Google Firestarters #2 – Design Thinking

The second Firestarters event, hosted by Google and curated by Neil Perkin, was an excellent evening – probably even better than the first evening. There were lots of interesting people to speak to and debate with in the break-out session and afterwards, while the Google catering is unrivalled. I’m amazed the staff aren’t twice the [...]

A little less information, a little more action

My New Year’s resolution was to cut the current – to step away from the real-time information flow so that I can spend more time thinking and reflecting. The first part of this has gone very well. The second part hasn’t – though I have reflected enough to realise that a third, related, aspect should [...]

Cutting the current

I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions, particularly since I never actually seem to keep them. But I start with good intentions, so I suppose that is at least something. In 2009, I vowed to read less, but better. That sort of happened, but the mass of information makes it difficult to resist. In 2010, [...]

Recommended Reading – 7th September 2010

As mentioned in my previous post, my link updates have returned after a six week gap. Inevitably, there is a backlog of great stuff I’d like to share. Putting them all in a single post would be unwieldy and, to an extent, commoditise the links. As such, I have split them over three posts. The [...]

Recommended Reading – 25th July 2010

The second and final group of links from the past month I recommend you click on is below: Northern Planner has ten great pieces of advice on how to plan if you live outside of London. The points are good advice in general, and transferable to many other things Adam Rifkin uses a metaphor of [...]

Google’s Think Video event

Yesterday, I attended the Google/Youtube hosted event “Think Video”. It was an event primarily aimed at marketers (research seminars tend not to have goodie bags), but I found it an interesting – if not groundbreaking – session. Below are some of the notes I scribbled down during the talks. I’ve linked or embedded the presentations, [...]

Avoiding insights

I really don’t like using the word “insight”. As I wrote here, the word is hideously overused. Rather than being reserved for hidden or complex knowledge, it is used to describe any observation, analysis or piece of intelligence. And so I’ve avoided using it as much as possible. In an earlier tweet, I referred to [...]