Management

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…
Entrepreneurs, Investors, Management, Strategy

What do screwdrivers, MacBook Air, and Bob Dylan have in common?

They say that pretty much everything can be analysed into a Boston Four Square, although BCG only uses it to look at the positioning of companies in a market. I have to admit to using it relentlessly, myself, but I’m starting to think there may be a Law of Three for entrepreneurs. Recent events here…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

Why we make yesterday’s decisions tomorrow

Wasn’t it Sterling Moss who said: “If you think you’ve just about got things under control, you’re not going nearly fast enough”?  So too, today’s business leaders. There aren’t many sectors that have escaped disruptive change. Most areas of business seem like a mad scramble to stay ahead, get ahead, or merely survive. The rate…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management

At last I see some certainty about start-ups

There was a time when a start-up was really early stage, typically pre-revenue, but the last five years or so have changed all that. Search the Financial Times for the phrase, for example, and you get results for seemingly all stages of ventures from IP spinouts from Universities to things like WeWork, Uber, Oyo, and…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Strategy

737Max, WeWork, and how tech can deceive

It looks as though the crew on the flight deck of the Lion Air 737Max that crashed, killing all 189 on board, behaved very differently from the crew that flew the same plane successfully the day before. The accounts of the final crash report point to a faulty sensor that convinced the plane’s software to…
Entrepreneurs, Executing, Investors, Management, Organisation

Pre-flight checks for business

Before you get airborne I used to fly helicopters, and we always used to say: “I’d rather be down here wishing I was up there, than up there wishing I was down here!”. Pre-flight checks are more important than flying: you could do one without the other, but never the other without the one. Those…