We all know that most consumer parcel delivery companies are pretty disdainful of their customers (recipients and retailers). However my latest encounter with City Link shows them plunging to new depths. I’ll tell you the tale in a moment, but first why write about it here? I’ve long cared passionately about customer service, which in [...]
Last night I finished watching the excellent BBC series The Virtual Revolution presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski. It served as a very useful reminder of how much our lives have been changed by technology in an incredibly short space of time. Dr Krotoski had access to a host of major individuals from Tim Berners-Lee (a [...]
By Ben | November 2, 2009
A thought-provoking interview this morning with Professor Victor Mayer-Schönberger on Radio 4’s Start the Week with Andrew Marr examined how we deal with the mass of personal information that we publish online: should more be done to build obsolescence into our personal data trail? This is an issue that I’ve written about before and to which [...]
By Ben | September 15, 2009
My book of the week is ‘Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature‘ by Mark Earls, a highly original take on marketing, consumerism, and the way we are influenced by business (or not as it happens). This book turned out to be so compelling that I placed on hold my two [...]
Also posted in Posts | Tagged Herd, Mark Earls, marketing |
Since this blog launched, we’ve been documenting job losses across the country. And a pretty depressing process that has proved to be. Our intention has always been to report on new jobs also, but understandably there have been few of those.
Imagine my excitement then, to read this article in today’s Times announcing 140 new jobs [...]
Dubbed the site Twitter was meant to be, check out My Life is Average for a, well, more average view of the world. I particularly recommend using the ‘best of the year’ filter.
One of my top recommended reads is The McKinsey Quarterly, which succeeds in combining well-written analysis of current business issues with a fresh take on how opportunities are presenting themselves, often through new technologies. This article entitled ‘upgrading talent‘ from Dec. 2008 shows the importance of promoting your talents within your current role: when redundancies [...]
Today, 24 March, is both the anniversary of the birth and death of John Harrison (1693 - 1776). If you have never heard of Harrison or the H4 read on, for his contribution to putting the Great into Britain is one we should seek to emulate today.
Harrison, a self-educated clock-maker, solved a problem that had [...]
Also posted in Economy, Posts | Tagged Economy, Innovation |
Despite the rise and rise of Web 2.0 sites such as Twitter*, I feel that we are entering an era of new-seriousness, post-trivialism perhaps. Suddently the words on everyone’s lips are not related to consumption (usually conspicious) but to economic concepts such as interest rates, employment, and the money supply (using that fantastically [...]
Also posted in Posts | Tagged Post-trivialism |
