Archive for 2012

Being a parent at Christmas is like working for an ungrateful boss. You do all the work and the fat guy in the suit ends up getting all the credit.

Whilst I was cooking in the kitchen my wife called out “Something smells delicious.” And I shout back “Well that would be me.” Too gay?

Cooking is pretty easy. You just have to turn off that part of your lizard brain that makes you scared. The great thing about cooking is that any uncertain future – “will this dish be edible?” – is only a few hours away at most.

If you’re an American, here’s how to offend a Brit in five words. Let the Brit spend several hours cooking a gourmet meal for you, and at the end of the meal, pay a compliment in American vernacular; you say “That food was quite good.” “quite” in the UK, when used to describe something, to…

On every project I have ever managed my second job has always been to identify the variables that introduce risk to the project, and then aggressively minimize as many of those variables as I can. When other people in the project prevent you from properly identifying the variables, won’t let you minimize them (measurement of…

Useful productivity hack: Stop paying attention to anything that is “news.”

You’re not afraid of the problem, you’re afraid of the solution.

You know those little animated under construction icons you found on websites in the nineties? I think everyone’s life should have one of those attached to it as each of us are always undergoing improvement, an overhaul, a little new construction

Here’s what I think: People mostly have one of three relationships with money. A majority of the population think of money in a very simplistic way – more money = more things I can own. The majority think this way because well, they don’t have much money and have never had much money and probably…

The larger your network, the more powerful the network effects. Stands to reason. Social networks are broken in to islands of connectivity – each individual island has strong social connections within it. But individual islands are generally loosely connected, or have, at best, only a few strong bonds to other islands of connectivity. It’s how…

We often confuse trends with fads because fads attract the wrong sort of people who mask the fact that a trend is taking place. The wrong sort of people in this particular case are those that are attracted to the shiny and new but never stick around long enough to see an idea reach maturity.

Love is the only currency that doesn’t fluctuate and cannot be devalued.  

That chip on your shoulder isn’t just making you walk lopsided, it’s making you walk in circles. It’s okay to have a chip on your shoulder, just don’t let it give you a blind spot to opportunities that are approaching from the side rather than just the ones directly in front.

It’s not that you don’t want to pursue everyone as your customer, but that you shouldn’t pursue everyone as your customer. Each customer is unique, but so is each segment of customers. Lumping in people who clearly shouldn’t be targeted as your customer clouds the group of people you should be pursuing. Think of your…

We acknowledge there’s a problem. We want to do right by the world. We want to do right by our clients. We want to do right by our employees or colleagues. We want to do right by our friends and family. But we cannot do things right the first time. So we adopt a stop…

In the workshop building furniture, in the kitchen when cooking or on a software development project building amazing experiences there are people that never learned to dance with their partners. They’re like the American Express slogan “Everywhere you want to be.” They miss the cues and the tells that observant dancers, cooks and developers take…

The end of the chain (us) rarely get to dictate what happens in the middle of the chain (the suppliers). When we do get a chance to make a difference, to have our voice heard, it’s important that we actually make our voice heard. As corporations become conglomerates, it gets harder to vote with your…

There’s a lot of different types of laziness in this world. Not all of them have names. But there’s two types you should definitely be aware of if you are smart and work under someone you feel is not so smart. To a manager (the bad kind who just wants a fungible cog in a…