Author Archives: Alastair Thomson

At the risk of sounding a bit Shakespearean, there are many tragedies in life. I realise the world has more than its fair share of problems at the moment, but one of the greatest tragedies is that our lives are being stripped of all the nuance, all the layers, all the individuality which – takenContinue reading “The puppet speaks”

It’s easy to get tech to eliminate friction. But often friction is there for a good reason. Turns out that much of it is invaluable.

Maths alone is insufficient to describe, much less predict, human decisions.

And even where maths can be of some help, a human can do in a nanosecond something that takes $1000s of IT resources.

So it’s not only insufficient. It’s inefficient too.

Elegance beats brute force 99 times out of 100. You’ll make better, more sustainable, less expensive, more value-adding decisions in the process.

Given that “it’s not the strongest of the species that survives, or the most intelligent, but the most adaptable to change”, why are your procedures so rigid?

For the whole to be greater than the sum of the parts, sometimes you need to encourage people to underperform.

It sounds like complicated things should be harder to manage, but that’s not true. Often, it’s the other way round.

While logic has a role, the sort of decisions that only humans can make – often seemingly “illogical” at the time – are where all the upside in life is.

Being effective is about building value in your customers’ eyes.

Being efficient is about impressing whoever sits above you in the organisational hierarchy.

Too few organisations realise that activity alone as a metric is profoundly harmful to their bottom line. It’s entirely possible to be really busy whilst having a negative impact on the bottom line.