At your service
Great advice, great service. Consultancy clients pay for the former and they expect the latter as standard, rightly so.
Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart – book review
They focus on money because their parents never told them they were loved. Gary Shteyngart at The Edinburgh Book Festival, 2018 The main character in Lake Success is a hedge fund multi-millionaire. And Gary Shteyngart did hard time in hedge fund circles as part of his research for the …
Filed under formative experiences – a top tip about gambling.
My grandfather used to breathe through a narrow, puckered mouth when he was concentrating. When he was driving in town, or when he was peeling and slicing an apple for his dog, he made a soft, high-pitched sound that wasn’t quite a whistle. This was a throwback to his days …
Filed under formative experiences – going wrong with money.
To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty. Napoleon I turned twenty on 17th March 1986. Two days later the Bank Of England dropped its base lending rate by one whole percentage point from 12.375% to 11.375%. From …
Filed under formative experiences – my first encounter with deliberate untruth.
I don’t know what age I was when this happened. I hope I was young enough for my disgusting behaviour and my naivety to be excusable. I was in a gang called the PVK. The V and the K make it sound like an Uzbek paramilitary organisation but we were …
Signal’s signals: defining my employer’s purpose and values.
Three sister agencies were merged into a single agency called Signal. And it fell to me to define the values of the merged entity. The output of that process is contained in the Slideshare file embedded below. It is designed to be self-explanatory and easy to digest. The output reflects …
Coffee austerity in Uganda.
You are a coffee farmer in Uganda. You till the soil on your patch of mountain with your spouse. You have three children and a dependent grandparent to support. You have a roof over your head and, to all intents and purposes, you are self-sufficient for food. You are …
Wake up and smell the broccoli. (And the coffee while you can.)
You won’t find any climate change deniers on the mountains of Uganda. Thirsty coffee trees don’t do fake news. Nor does broccoli. When the rain fell too heavily on the plains of Spain in December 2016, washing away entire crops, broccoli and other vegetables disappeared from British supermarket shelves. Prices …
JWT25 is stupidly ageist.
JWT25, the deliberately youthful and deludedly agile content production start-up from JWT Singapore, is stupidly ageist in my relatively senile opinion. Here is the agency’s pitch according to The Drum. JWT has launched a new service called JWT25 which uses young content creators to focus on short content made quickly. …
Technology vs Machinery.
Every organisation has “machinery”. It’s a legacy combination of structure, culture and process. New technology and old machinery are seldom a good match. Technology vs machinery.