The journal
Notes and essays on the things I work on, think about and experience — across life, adventure, consulting and technology.
4 min read
Most organisations can describe their customer journey in detail. Far fewer can describe what happens when it fails — and the failure route is the one customers remember, talk about and judge you on.
4 min read
Sixteen years married, and the thing that changed us did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a set of holiday photographs neither of us could look at, and a long drive home in which we agreed to stop doing it on our own.Sixteen years married, and the thing that changed us did not arrive as a crisis. It arrived as a set of holiday photographs neither of us could look at, and a long drive home in which we agreed to stop doing it on our own.
4 min read
Entry-level work is disappearing from British organisations, for several reasons at once. Nobody decided to reduce the supply of future senior staff, but the volume work that quietly produced them is going all the same.
4 min read
Most cost reduction programmes hit their number. Rather fewer keep it. Eighteen months on, the cost base has crept back and nothing obviously went wrong — because taking out cost is not the same as taking out work.
4 min read
A fear I picked up in about a minute as a child and spent thirty years failing to shift. Trying was never the problem. What finally worked was my youngest daughter, going at my pace for as long as it took.
4 min read
Somewhere in most organisations is a monthly invoice nobody approved. It is large, it is growing, and every line on it is legitimate. Almost nothing else an organisation buys arrives that way, and the controls were never built for it.
4 min read
Most organisations are asking where they could use AI. That produces a list of pilots and very little else. The question that changes anything is what you would do differently if the work cost a tenth as much.
4 min read
An independent income does not arrive in a line. It arrives in lumps, with gaps, and the gaps are never where you planned them. What surprised me is how little of that ever reached my family materially — and how much of it reached them anyway.
4 min read
For twenty years computing behaved like something you order. It is now limited by a physical input with a lead time measured in years, and most organisations are exposed to that through suppliers rather than directly.
