Brave enough to not be busy
Sometimes we talk about being less busy as a kind of dream or a luxury. Not being overworked is not a luxury that you earn …
My best reads of 2019
Writing about what I read in the past twelve months has become an annual ritual, part of the seasonal no-man’s-land between Boxing Day and New …
The Hero
My lovely sister-in-law and her husband gave me this TLS monograph as a Christmas gift: The Hero, by Lee Child. It’s rather magnificent, so I’m …
Systems, planning and punches to the face
TL;DR: “dynamic, self-adjusting system cannot be governed by a static, unbending policy” is academic for “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the …
Two ad giants falling. Will either get up again?
The different approaches at WPP and Publicis are examined in an FT article today. While both companies have endured falling share prices for the past …
An Emmy costs Amazon seven times more than HBO
Scott Galloway kills it with his combination of lo-fi diagrams and deadpan insights. For example, how much it costs each of the three streaming giants …
Friday’s Lies
Friday is lie day, it appears. In an article in The Economist, “Lie Detector“, we learn about Demaskuok, a Lithuanian tool developed to spot fake …
What you humans call common decency
For a little while, first thing this morning, the most-read article on the FT this morning wasn’t Brexit*, war or impending catastrophe of any of …
Fresh metaphors, please
“Madame, all our words from loose using have lost their edge…” — Death in The Afternoon, by Ernest Hemingway Hemingway, as usual, hit the thing …
A horrifying version of us
The idea of “personal brand” seems to be resurgent. Ten years ago, when I wrote Me and My Web Shadow it was a thing – but …