Authored by Carl Michel, an Operating Partner of The Strategy Exchange, and originally published at Firedrop.ai. This week, I got an email from a large and well-known online hotel provider offering me some competitive options to book a hotel in Porto. Nothing extraordinary in that and yet it was completely…
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Introduction This article gives a brief overview of flash business reaction to the referendum outcome, consensus economic forecasts and our views on them, our central and upside cases for trade negotiations, our take on regulatory issues, potential implications for private, public and foreign investment, and a review of the risks…
Usually the best way to figure something out is to lock yourself away and concentrate. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. Open plan offices are a disaster from this perspective. So, often but not always, are the ubiquitous ‘brainstorming’ sessions. Far too often any problem worth tackling, presented to…
Part One took a heroic stab at explaining the technology that underpins Bitcoin – the blockchain. But although the mysterious inventor (or inventors) of the blockchain concept, ‘Satoshi Nakamoto’, wrote specifically about using it to implement a ‘crypto-currency’, the concept is not dependent on this: in principle the blocks could…
In 1936, a promising young Cambridge Mathematician, Alan Mathison Turing, published a peculiar paper with a misleadingly dry title. On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem was an important piece of work in the world of formal mathematical logic, a world blown apart 5 years earlier by Kurt…
For the last quarter century I’ve eaten most weeks at a nearby Italian restaurant, Roberto’s. Locally to where I live there isn’t a huge choice anyway, but this one would still hold its own in the middle of the Metropolis, and in any case I’m kind of loyal to places…
A review of The Agile Minded Executive, by Karla Robertson Books on psychological ‘hacks’ for business effectiveness have a tendency to be excellent but technically a little dense (David Rock’s ‘Your Brain at Work’ and Tony Schwartz’s ‘The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working’ being my favorites), or borderline fatuous…
Look, I love modern Greece. Since my wife and I met, what, 28 years ago now, we’ve usually spent a month every year in Greece. And I love Ancient Greece. As a teenage boy I was enraptured by Plato’s dialogues of Socrates. (Although, in hindsight, I’m not altogether sure why…
People conceptualise strategy in different ways – value chains, five forces, Bowman clocks, parenting matrices, business model canvas – that sort of thing. For what it’s worth, I tend to visualise a strategic position as a kind of network of conditions, inter-linked in different, complex ways, and constantly evolving and…