Russell Davies

Artificial flirting

 

The robots are getting better.

They're not getting cleverer, they're getting whatever they need to get to convince us they're getting cleverer.

And maybe that will be enough.

Strategy & Leadership

We've been having some fun with the Deloitte Digital Maturity Survey. I got a bit intrigued by the maths underlying it and marked all the answers N/A.

I guess they hadn't anticipated that unhappy path, but there is some justice, if you score 0% on everything it still means you've performed strongest on 'Strategy & Leadership'. CORRECT!

The Anatomy of Humbug

I done a journalism and interviewed Paul Feldwick for Campaign. 

(I'm linking to it, but I can never bring myself to read anything I've written after it's subbed so, you know, it might be rubbish. Apologies if it is.)

I'm mentioning it because I think The Anatomy of Humbug is an incredibly important book*. I'm going to be discussing it more. Get yourself a copy and read along as every advertising theory dissolves into dust.

*Importance being relative here, I mean incredibly important within the narrow world of marketing.

Pace layers, side notes

 

I was thinking about this again the other day. Two thoughts:

1. Maybe that what's so interesting and disruptive about 'digital transformation' is that when you start to build infrastructure out of software then infrastructure starts to move at the pace of commerce, or even fashion. It moves at the pace of ideas.

2. This is a great illustration of what happens when you harness the different layers too tightly to each other  - connecting modish marketing language to old, slow architecture and development.

"The area around St Giles, including the north side of Denmark Street bordering the gargantuan Centre Point tower is being remodelled as a large, multimedia building complex called Outernet, a fully web-connected “street scape,” with shops, cafes and a new performance space. It will, according to the marketing blurb, mean we can “interact with the brands we love in exciting new ways,” it will be “a new dawn for meaningful brand engagement” promising “branded real-time experiences that add value to people’s lives”.

 

blog all kindle highlights: The Rhesus Chart

Read The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross a while ago. Only one highlight. Again, not because it's a bad book, just not that sort of book. This was a resonant expression though.

"A bureaucracy is all about standardization, so that necessary tasks can be accomplished regardless of the abilities of the human resources assigned to it."

 

blog all kindle highlights

Ned Beauman's novel Glow is remarkable in its concision; small on the outside, worlds on the inside. Wonderful London. Dark, very funny.

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) January 20, 2015

Just finished Glow by Ned Beauman, read on Mr Gibson's twitter recommendation. Very good, hard to describe. I didn't highlight much, it's not that kind of book, but these few do some to convey an accurate picture:

"latex gloves, spoons, tinfoil, small resealable plastic bags, a few tubs of lactose, a vacuum brush, and a set of microgram digital scales"

"Marx’s creed seemed to be that material things had more power over people than people had over material things, which struck Zaya as not all that different from the animism of his grandparents, with its tribe spirits and crop spirits and weather spirits."

"he’d lost track of the rules of banality"

"void void void void"

 

33-39

Carry on

I always remembered the histories of Keep Calm and Carry On saying that it was never actually issued and displayed in public, so I was surprised to see this picture (above) in Cecil Beaton's Air of Glory.

I checked and though some histories still say that, the wikipedia entry says "the poster was hardly ever publicly displayed" (my italics)

I wonder if the fact that it turns up in a Cecil Beaton photo suggests it was more widely distributed than previously believed, or that this photo was staged with the assistance of the relevant Ministry. Or, indeed, if it suggests nothing.

 

Helplessness and the snail

When thinking about large organisations and their relationships to 'digital' a couple of concepts from other fields always pop into my head.

(That's some of the fun of doing something new - you get to appropriate language and ideas from other areas and see if it helps your understanding of what you're doing.)

Learned helplessness is the first. I thought I'd written about it on here before, but it turned out it was in Campaign.

The second is wilful blindness, an idea I first came across during the Enron trial. Wikipedia describes it as "a term used in law to describe a situation in which an individual seeks to avoid civil or criminal liability for a wrongful act by intentionally putting his or herself in a position where he or she will be unaware of facts that would render him or her liable."

ie people seek to avoid knowing the obvious, so they don't get the blame for it.

And clearly, in many instances (as described in this edition of Analysis) it describes more serious corporate failings than not grokking the internet - though the underlying dynamics seem similar.

It's somewhat akin to the famous Upton Sinclair quote:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

And is a nice companion to this cartoon.

But, really, in the end, I think we can agree that both Learned Helplessness and Wilful Blindness are just manifestations of the well-known Coates Snail Syndrome.

 

 

 

As true today as it's ever been