When I first saw the HTML title of the tech blog Pando – Speaking truth to the new power – it grabbed me by the throat. Recently Oxfam have announced that by 2016 the combined wealth of the richest one percent will be greater than that of the other 99 percent …
I was nervous to start with. So was Gabe. The training wheels were off, it was dusk, and there was a warm breeze blowing in from the bay tousling his hair. He was desperate to become part of a club he had been obsessed with from his time wobbling around in …
Poetry is important. My wife is a poet and fights against those who think poetry is irrelevant and an outdated mode of expression. WordPress say that “code is poetry”. Poetry helps kids learn how to read better – Dr Seuss.
There’s a convention that corporate transactional and promotional emails are sent from donotreply@bigcorporation.com or no-reply@bigfacelesscorporation.com. This is normally followed with a nice message that goes something like: Please do not reply to this email. Any emails to this address will not be responded to. How rude and passive aggressive. What they are …
I’ve been reading a lot about simplification recently. About removing stuff and improving products, disrupting markets, and smashing the lazy incumbents. It’s the kind of thing which when you see it, it smacks you in the face and you ask yourself why someone else or you hadn’t done this before. Some …
In his 2010 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mario Vargas Llosa, spoke lovingly about what reading and literature had given him saying “Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams”. He goes on to say that without literature, without writing the world would be a darker, more tedious place. “We …
I was watching the slightly oddball Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock tonight watching my wife roll her eyes at the intense thinking faces and very British action when it struck me that Sherlock Holmes would have been a great product manager.
It isn’t easy to talk at a conference in Australia these days if you’re a right wing conservative Christian, super sleazy dating coach, or anti-vaccination campaigner. In fact it’s almost impossible. If a conference is on the edgy/reactionary side and contrary to (left-wing) social media norms the conference venues are pressured via social media to …
Faust is one of my favourite texts. I like both Marlowe and Goethe’s telling of the old German story about the greedy Doctor Faust who bored with the tedium of ordinary life makes a pact with the Devil in exchange for knowledge, pleasure, and exquisite experience. So I was instantly engaged when …
Ideas are awesome. I love nothing better than being inspired a multitude of earth rocking ideas about the world, my products, books, blog posts, what customers want, what makes people tick, why James Joyce wrote Ulysses and what it’s about, what the next big thing is, or what I fervently believe the government …
