Originally published on GoodReads here. As someone who has worked in professional services for my entire career and as a consultant for much of this, I was never going to agree with all of the findings of “The Big Con: How the Consulting industry weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments…

People create value. Creating an environment in which talented humans — of all generations — want to work is *the* business challenge and equally the huge opportunity of our times. As a leader in a pretty successful and growing professional services organisation and having a focus on the development of…

The options to organise tech and software-focused organisations is an incredibly well documented area that has come on in leaps and bounds over the last 15 years. Nevertheless, the flow of new books in this space continues unabated. Having spent most of my career either designing and building large scale…

Bad news up front: I found this book hard work and over long. Having said that, it is — as one would expect from Daniel Kahneman — exquisitely researched, coherently argued and full of loads and loads of insights. The fundamental insights about the types of noise around predictions, judgement…

First published on goodreads here I have to admit that I put “Humankind: A Hopeful History” by Rutger Bregman on my summer holiday reading list because of the people that recommended it on the sleeve; Stephen Fry, Yuval Noah Harari and Tim Harford are some pretty solid credentials. I was…

Originally published on Good Reads, here A recent recommendation by a smart colleague, I am not sure how I missed this book when it first came out, as much of it resonates incredibly well with my view about reciprocity in the business world and the idea of “paying it forward”. …

First published on goodreads here. A pretty recent edition to the “landscape-shaped” design and innovation Must-Reads, made popular by Osterwalder and co.. “Design Thinking for Business Growth” caught my attention because of the specific subtitle on business ecosystems; given my day job, working with our clients and partners across multiple…

Review first published on Good Reads: here Stumbled across this updated 3rd edition of Running Lean by Ash Maurya recently — it is a worthwhile update and a reminder that these relatively early books on lean startup thinking are still — to my mind at least — the best. Maurya covers the entire lifecycle really well and outlines pragmatic tools and insights that — whilst in the meantime are well understood, are still not practiced well; neither in startup land nor in enterprise side innovation programmes, where many of the approaches have relevance.

First published on goodreads. What I really enjoyed about “Ask your developer” was the matter-of-fact style — a strong reminder that good practice in building strong tech organisations is well understood and, in fact, pretty well spread in business (and not “just” the usual high tech suspects). Coming from the…