Blog

It’s Christmas… time for homecoming stories. Lanky boys return from university with bags of washing and stories of all night drinking sessions, or the miracle of passed exams. Savvy girls back from the big smoke with too much eyeliner recount stories of sociopathic bosses or avaricious landlords. The identities in the stories differ, but the […]

  Have you noticed how boring politics has become? Journalists search for the reasons we’ve lost interest, but they don’t need to look very far. Journalists are writers, and every writer knows that the key to a compelling story is empathy. Not fancy language, correct information or sentence structure. It’s the ability to evoke a […]

  “For fucks sake…” I’m at the help desk at JFK. A sweating, overweight man in front of me isn’t all that pleased about the help on offer. “Seriously?” (This word seems to be the current U.S. abbreviation for “Is it just me, or do you detect a touch of irony in this exchange?”) The […]

It was business guru, Seth Godin, who popularised the term “Permission Marketing”.  Like all new phrases, Permission Marketing emerged from the culture that surrounded it. We had grown tired of its opposite force – “Interruption Marketing” – the barrage of information coming at us from all forms of media. “Buy me! Notice me! Like me!” […]

  I knew there was a problem when the head of site services stormed into the Production office demanding payment for 30 toilet doors. Before that I was too stressed to wonder what the small bonfires in the distance were made of. It was cold. So, in a gesture of creative anarchy, the heavy metal […]

Just finish the damn book already. There are too many books. The world doesn’t need another one. Nobody reads anyway. I need coffee. Another? I thought you were trying to be healthy. What about a green juice? But I’m writing. I haven’t got time to make juice. Who are you kidding? You haven’t written a […]

  It started out so well… like most ideas whose time had come. No-one knows exactly HOW it started, but suddenly people began waking up to the fact that the future wasn’t fixed. It could be changed. WE could change. Strange now, to imagine that things could ever have been otherwise, but before the 1960s […]

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity” Charles Dickens certainly knew how to describe the general mood prior to the French Revolution. Many people feel this […]

Remember the days when every motivational seminar, strategy session and change management program, began with an iceberg model? This visual was used to represent what we thought was the problem (tip of the iceberg) and of course the much bigger problem lurking beneath the surface (which we were all trying to avoid). You could use […]

I went to see the movie HER the other day. I’d been a bit ambivalent about going… on the one hand there are great reviews of the original plot line, on the other hand, a story of a man who falls in love with his computer may sound more like reality TV! Whereas most sci-fi […]