Apr 172014
 
100 word review: The five dysfunctions of a team, by Patrick Lencioni

Poorly written, overly long, but containing useful information. This could be the summary of most business books. Leoncioni works on organisational structure and behaviour with companies, and builds fables to teach his principles. The fables are really, really difficult to read, but there is something about using storytelling that makes it stick, I suppose, but […]

Mar 082013
 
International Women's Day

  So it’s international women’s day. As Adam Roberts says, I’m not so worried about that as there are 364 International Men’s Days. We’ve been thinking about women a lot at Bethnal Green Ventures. We’ve taken the apparently controversial decision to state “We particularly welcome applications from women” during our call for ideas. We’ve received […]

Feb 142013
 
Some fine news for Bethnal Green Ventures

At work we’ve been sitting on some excellent news since before Christmas: Bethnal Green Ventures, our for-profit accelerator programme, is going to be back in 2013, bigger and better than ever. What we’ll be doing, along with our partners the Cabinet Office, Nesta and Nominet Trust, is taking super early stage teams and giving them […]

May 202010
 

Stop what you’re doing right now and to to http://www.rapportive.com/ and install the extension. What? You’re not using Chrome or Firefox? What the heck is it? It’s an extension to Chrome and/or Firefox that replaces the sidebar where the google ads turn up with information about the sender– specifically, their blog, twitter, linkedin, etc. You […]

Sep 162009
 

My final post from (10000km and a two weeks after) SoCap. Sorry this is late– I’ve just been indundated by the types of things that inundate your life at the end of five months on the road: I hadn’t slept in the same place (and mostly in the same country) for more than three weeks […]

Apr 192009
 
Afri-brandtastic

African Branding Kampala– and much of Africa– in incredibly brand-conscious. Entire buildings and building blocks are painted (often just for the cost of the paint and labour) in UTL blue, Warid red, Zain purple-pink (a particulalry hideous shade that makes me think of a little blood mixed with Pepto-Bismol– see below), and now Orange. Bugolobi […]

 Posted by at 08:52
Apr 182009
 

Figure out what you’re good at and be who you are. In strategy courses, we talk a lot about sustainable competitive advantage-what it is that makes your company better than others at doing what it is that you do-in some cases, you may have companies that compete in markets but don’t directly compete against each […]

 Posted by at 19:44
Apr 142009
 

You don’t get to make the rules; deal with it. This one you hopefully learned in undergrad, but it bears some repeating. You take a top international business programme which requires several years’ experience to get in and you’re quite likely to have a lot of talented people who are used to having their way […]

 Posted by at 07:16