When it comes to success in business… Experience can be effective and doesn’t have to take long to accrue. But… experience has an increasingly short half-life and can be ruinously expensive. Knowledge can help and is now freely available. But… the right knowledge can take more time than you have to acquire enough of. In […]
Want Your Bank To Be a Tech Firm? Be Careful What You Wish For.
The radio-alarm came on and I had to force myself not wake Mrs B with a string of F-bombs. Why? Because I was listening to how yet another bank wants to be a tech company. DNB are not alone. Execs at Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and Goldman have all recently declared their banks to be or aspire to be tech […]
Marketing Strategy vs Tactics (The difference & why it matters)
The other day, a startup founder told me their ‘marketing strategy’ is to get their product to go viral by hoping people would tell others about it. Oh, and they are ‘doing’ Twitter. I had to go home and have a lie down. Why? Because I’m tired of explaining the difference between marketing strategy vs tactics and why it matters. I’m […]
Halve Your Time in Meetings
Talk about old and new worlds colliding! I’d just started a new gig in the City having taken some time out and having read The 4-Hour Work Week. So was feeling decidedly conflicted about returning to work at an old-school big bank. One of the first things that struck me was a pavlovian behaviour of scheduling every […]
Just in Case
It just wasn’t good enough! The heat was on and I was told we had to cross the finish line sooner. It was a high-profile project and necks were on the line. Including mine. I patiently explained that we were doing everything humanly possible to speed things along. When asked what the padding was at […]
On Brexit
Some thoughts on whether we should stay in the EU or leave… SLOGANS & HASHTAGS There’s no doubt. The Leave camp have had the best slogans with “Take Back Control”, and alluding to “Independence Day”. They also managed to rally forces around a single (if jarring) hashtag, #Brexit. When trying to win hearts and minds, slogans and […]