Seeing over the horizon

Entrepreneurs, Investors, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Why vaccines make business different from personal life

Last year was the year of strategic uncertainty. We began 2020 with a big shock in the Spring, empty roads, makeshift working from home, and immense turmoil as we all scrambled to work out how to survive for as long as it might take. We didn’t know how long that might be or what might…
Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

The angry mob of Covid issues coming in 2021

We will look back on 2020 with some nostalgia as a year when life was challenging but simple. The strategy was Hope and Cope, and this would all be over soon.  That myth will evaporate in 2021. At one level, the twelve months ahead looks like a straightforward journey with obvious steps to take in…
Covid-19, Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Everything is normal again

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, or at least it used to be. There was a time when we looked forward to more of everything we hoped for and had a good chance of it arriving. Or that was what we thought. We were planners, full of ideas about the things we were going to do,…
Investors, Management, Organisation, Strategy

Sickness is the risk that decision makers must manage, not fatalities

Family friends of ours set off last week to drive to see their son who is in his first term at university. They had a call in the middle of the journey – their son had been hospitalised with Coronavirus. Not long ago, a friend of mine was out on his mountain bike with a…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Navigation aids for decision makers in a Covid World

For a few months in the Spring of 2020 it was hard to see what any sort of future looked like. Business decision making was strictly about securing survival and, as they say in Formula One: “If you want to finish first, first you’ve got to finish”.  Often, the amount of time this survival effort…
Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Business decision making in a Covid world

In the middle of all the upheaval and turbulence being caused by Coronovirus, and with anger and posturing all around, business decision-makers must navigate and that means they have take a view and make decisions. Tony Yardley-Jones and I worked on the bird ‘flu epidemic in ’09, giving some business leaders advice on the background…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Is Cloud deployment a Slam Dunk?

It’s never been easier to spin up Cloud infrastructure and get going. The obvious brands are, well, obvious – the Hyper-scalers, as they’re known – and they grease the on-ramp with free credits for start-ups; uploading and storing data is free; firing up a few instances is so simple. What could go wrong? Three trends…
Covid-19, Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Management, Trend Spotting

How Covid-19 caused an IT support issue

The jury’s in, and it’s good news for tech: Coronavirus gave everyone a great big shove and now everyone’s online for almost everything. It was always going to happen eventually, but Covid-19 made the transition of the next five years happen In five weeks. Consumers and business, Enterprise and SMEs, commercial and public sector. It…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

Certainties for decision makers in the wreckage of C19

Anyone with responsibilities for the future must look past the chaos and wreckage of Covid-19 and largely ignore anything in the rear view mirror. There will be lots of debate and argument about what happened and how different it should have been, but decision-makers have to avoid that distraction because their focus must be on…
Digitalisation, Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy

The days of getting online are over

Robert Mason described it well. He said that when his flying instructor first gave him control of the pedals, the machine started swinging about wildly, and he hadn’t done anything! So true. You’d think that flying can’t be that much of a challenge, but it is, especially helicopters. My instructor gave me a stern talking…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

Everything’s going to be different in 2020

It was the sight of the old computer board that caught my eye and led me to watch a tv programme first aired over forty years ago. It was nostalgic to see Philip Hughes again, and those green screen word processors. It quite took me back to Logica’s Newman Street offices and gentleman farmer Hector…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy, Trend Spotting

2020 looks pretty much a done deal

Who needs another set of forecasts when 2020 looks like it’s largely a done deal? Like most decision makers, I’m sure, I’ve already got a plan for much of 2020, so we’re now into executing plans and forecasts are a bit late.  I don’t find many of them are that helpful, either, what with one…