Change has to start somewhere. Sometimes that starting point can be – or has to be – big and dramatic, but probably more often it’s small and tentative. We may know where we want to get to, we may know the direction in which to start off, but there cannot be a second step until [...]
… asks Jessica Hagy:
A few weeks ago, I reflected on the lesson of first world war generalship that it may be safer to fail with near certainty in the traditional manner than to run even a small risk of failure in a novel manner: the former is understood, the latter is punished. John Kay’s most recent column for [...]
Anybody who has spent any time working in the public sector will have got used to being told how much better everything is in the private sector, and will probably also have learned to brush such comments aside without taking too much notice of them. That’s good because such comments are often ill-informed, but very [...]
“Think big” is easy.
“Start small” is also easy.
“Scale quickly” is very hard.
More from Indexed
In what was, for me, the early period of e-government, I remember sitting in an attic in Whitehall (quite literally), reading the Cluetrain Manifesto which had been published a few months before, in April 1999. It was an important book not because it marked the beginning of something – the internet and e-commerce were no [...]
The idea that people should work out what they are good at and like doing, and then go an try to make a living doing it is hardly new or revolutionary. I have come across two prescriptions recently. One is simple and in one sense quite traditional. It comes from Joel Spolsky who runs a [...]
Clay Shirky, internet guru, recently gave a "provocation" at Supernova and the video has gone up on YouTube. It’s powerful stuff. And it was at that moment that I understood what was going on. Because they didn’t care. They didn’t care that they had seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn’t [...]
Marc Andreessen – who wrote the first mainstream web browser – has some advice about how to hire the best people you’ve ever worked with. He has three criteria: drive – “I define drive as self-motivation — people who will walk right through brick walls, on their own power, without having to be asked, to [...]