Charity:Water talk at Stanford

Just listened to another good podcast from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Leadship series.

Scott Harrison, founder of Charity:Water gives an entertaining but thought-provoking talk on his path to setting up the charity and how to make things happen by communicating and thinking about things a little differently.

A timely reminder also on the size of the problem of access to clean water, given this weeks events in the Phillipines.

Here is a link to the talk.


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Factors effecting B2B brand image

I just read a really interesting article from McKinsey on the disconnect between the factors that B2B suppliers emphasise in their branding and what their customers care about.. so much for customer-centricity reaching the B2B space..

Checking it out here.

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Business survivors - BBC podcast

It has been a while since I posted; let us put it down to a summer break ;-).

Just a quick one this morning. Sitting on a bus in a traffic jam listening to Business survivors (link here), a thoroughly enjoyable summary of 25 years of Peter Day's "In Business" radio show.

I have listened to the In Business podcast for many years and almost always find it interesting - rather than taking a specialist view on a topic, he has a real skill at addressing even the most "innovative" topics from a layman'a point of view. In doing so he cuts through a lot of the crap by focusing on a basic premise; people serving people the best way possible to make money.

You can find the archive of
In Business with Peter Day here.


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Great map of most popular sites across globe

Great map of the most popular internet sites across the globe: here is the link


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McKinsey & use case points ;-)

It is a sad day when McKinsey delivers an article on transformation in application development effectiveness that has nothing to say beyond "use use cases and then estimate use case points as an output oriented measure / KPI."

I found nothing new in the article that reads like the standard fare from the late Nineties/early Naughties on this topic (and probably before to be honest) ...still, if nothing else, it is a sign of the maturity of a process in IT when it pops up on McKinsey's radar.

The full article is here.


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eCommerce statistics and outlook

That the UK is the most developed online market in some ways will surprise nobody, but this report nevertheless has lots of interesting statistics comparing countries. Here is the full report.


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"Infobesity" and decision making

A recent article by Bain caught my attention.

Admittedly, this was initially because of the dreadful term "Infobesity" (information overload), but the article makes a succinct case that in the age of big data most companies are missing the point and losing themselves in their data.

I think this is true to a point; though "big data" certainly holds much promise, it also has the potential to waste even more time of more and more people if not managed well.

This is especially true in the context of decision-making. More data can mean better decisions, but as often as not it just means more circles. To my mind, being clear about the decision process, being aware of the soundness of the underlying data and then making the decision and moving on is almost always better than analysis paralysis.

Good quality data, rather than massive volumes of data seems preferable to me ;-).

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