Is there a more loyal customer anywhere than Wile. E. Coyote? He has a very simple job he wants his purchases to do: to catch the varmint Roadrunner, so Mr W E Coyote can get something to eat for once in his miserable existence and avoid being splattered all over the canyon floor. But despite […]

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Go to the Blue Sea, look along the shore At all the old white bones forsaken – New ghosts are wailing there now with the old, Loudest in the dark sky of a stormy day. – Du Fu These are the closing words of a poem by one of China’s greatest poets. Du Fu had […]

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It is a sad feeling to know that you have peaked. And yet, as the future slopes gently down into the night ahead of you, it is always comforting to remember your moment. Peak You. Mine involved an IT project meeting and Conan the Barbarian. This is how it happened. Pull your chairs closer and listen. […]

Read more "Contemplate This on the Tree of Woe: the Leadership Lessons of Conan the Barbarian"

  Over time, some words become unfashionable. Very few people today call the close of the day eventide or the gathering shadows the gloaming. We tend now to say three times rather than thrice, sitting room not parlour, excellent rather than spiffing (what ho!). Very few slightly dodgy people are today referred to as a rum do. […]

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They were separated by four hundred years and fourteen thousand kilometers, but the two leaders faced similar problems. They had inherited great empires, one political, one commercial, but both were looking at the spectre of collapse. Keeping the magnificent institutions of their empires alive was soaking up too much of the treasury. Their temples and […]

Read more "The Ballad of Neutron Jack"

It is the time honoured right and tradition of every Englishman and woman to sit in the public bar and complain about That London. Bloody London, where they eat food off slates and boards and bin lids and things. Bloody London full of foreigners (“no offense, Szymon, and another pint please”) bloody London with the […]

Read more "Complexity, collapse, and eating off bin lids."

I recently had the privilege of attending a lecture by Professor Ranjit Gulati of Harvard Business School. In passing he mentioned Kodak, the once utterly dominant film and imaging company which filed for bankruptcy in 2012. “As their business declined,” he said, “the executives kept saying ‘we need to be a technology company, we need […]

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Shortly after midnight on the 29th of May, the final assault on the Roman Empire began. Wave after wave of soldiers poured against the mighty walls, wearing down the already exhausted Romans, before the final assault by elite shock troops finally breached the defences. The Emperor, Constantine, raised his sword and cried out “let them […]

Read more "The Towers of Afrasiab"