Many moons ago I wrote a blog post asking:

“Is it unfair to characterise the IT industry as dodgy characters in cheap suits selling wish fulfilment to out of their depth executives?”

Sadly those guys have now moved on to package and sell social into the business world. People are being fleeced for over engineered, over priced and over sold bloatware. This is not in anyone’s long term best interests.

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Happiness is a newly mown lawn. And yet how hard it is to get started. I will do anything but get that mower out and have even been known to hope for rain on a day I have agreed to cut the grass.

But the quiet satisfaction of getting it done is so sweet. The slightly aching muscles, the smell of petrol and newly mown grass, the neat, alternating, light and dark lines drawing your eye down the centre of the garden. It feels good for a short while. I resolve to try harder next time.

But I know I won’t …

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I just tweeted about the odd feeling of cramming ideas into my head as fast as I can when eventually my head will no longer exist. This wasn’t necessarily as gloomy a thought as some may have assumed.

I have often thought that writing a blog post is like lobbing a pebble into a pond. You are not sure where the ripples will end up but you aspire to getting better at lobbing them and making bigger ripples.

A while back I was chatting with a friend about recent discoveries in neuroscience and got on to the way significant or repeated thoughts have a physical and persistent effect on our synapses. We reckoned that one way to achieve physical immortality would be to make sufficiently significant and replicable dents in enough people’s heads – literally!

As we parted he said that my pebbles were rippling in his pond. I reckon this is as much as we can hope for …

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This year I have had the honour of sitting on the board of trustees for Homeless Link, a membership organisation of groups helping homeless people in the UK. I have rarely come across an organisation with so many smart, nice people working really hard to do something so worthwhile. They have produced a video review of some of the things they have been involved in over the past year which will give you a flavour of the important work they do.

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1. At least thirty years of ingrained business culture that focusses on process rather than people and doesn’t have the language or concepts to handle relationships.
2. Senior people who will never get “it” but have the power to stop “it” happening.
3. People’s fear of disapproval if they say what they think.
4. Vendors who talk nonsense about unrealistic timescales and benefits and want to lock them into over-engineered solutions that keep IT departments happy but don’t change the world.
5. IT
6. IT

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It fascinates me the amount of effort that goes into maintaining brands. Organizations fabricate these shiny images of themselves and then fight fiercely to protect them. They spend loads of money polishing their shiny façades and even turn the myths inwards on their staff.

But it’s bollocks and we all know it. These fabricated brand images fool no one. We all know, even my kids know, that reality bears no relation to the shiny image. Our impressions of companies and their products are formed day to day in our experiences and our conversations.

So why is it so hard to have real people talking with real customers about real products or services? What are brands so scared of?

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I have an increasing conviction that an old world is crumbling under its own corrupt weight and that something new and interesting is beginning to emerge in its place. But two things worry me. Firstly that the new thing isn’t working itself out as fast as the old thing is falling apart. And secondly that we will be tempted to turn the new thing into a thing. I have referred before to when Stowe Boyd first used the word “movement” to describe what we were seeing emerging around us and that this made me feel nervous. What we have here is too fragile and precious to turn it into an “-ism” or an “-ology”. As soon as we do that it will start to it will develop its creeds, orthodoxies and priesthoods and start to die.

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The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then
they will be in control in its wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it
is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good; that is
the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without
trying to control them.
- Shunryu Suzuki in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind

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The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). Vladimir Nabokov

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Going green is highly profitable for three reasons: it cuts costs, reduces risk against rising energy and electricity prices and can increase revenue because a large segment of consumers want to buy products and services from green companies.

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