Category: Uncategorized

Digital Strategy ?

When someone says “digital strategy”, or just “strategy,” what comes to mind? You might think of strategic roadmaps, strategic pillars, ROI, KPI’s or a whole range of other deliverables and concepts that create a strategy.

Yet, today many of these tools are based on a foundation that is no longer true. Assuming consumer and business behaviors and activities are not going to change for 12 months is a vision of the past. In reality, the only constant is change and the rate of adoption of new forms of technology and consumer experiences are way in advance of any roadmap that tries to predict the future. So what can you do? This collection of articles looks at ways to become more agile, critiques best practices, and tries to help you avoid doing things that are actually destructive to your own success.

 

The SIMPLE Answer to Digital Strategy

“Most of the challenges you’ll face will be with folks trying to make this bigger (because that’s easier), slower (because that’s easier too) or stalling (because that’s easiest).”

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Quit Social Media. Your Career May Depend on It.

“The idea of purposefully introducing into my life a service designed to fragment my attention is as scary to me as the idea of smoking would be to an endurance athlete, and it should be to you if you’re serious about creating things that matter”

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Digital Strategy is Dead

“By learning to act and iterate quickly in small ways, companies build their most sustainable competitive advantage: agility.”

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IBM is gearing up to become the world’s largest and most sophisticated design company

“Designers bring this intuitive sense for what it [the assignment] means. They understand the power of delivering a great experience and how to treat a user as if they were guests in their own home,” says Gilbert, who’s also the company’s designated chief design evangelist.”

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Why “Agile” and especially Scrum are terrible

“The worst thing about estimates is that they push a company in the direction of doing work that’s estimable”

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VW turns off out-of-hours email

“It’s bad for the individual worker’s performance being online and available 24-7. You do need downtime, you do need periods in which you can actually reflect on something without needing instantaneously to give a reaction,” said Will Hutton, chair of the Big Innovation Centre at The Work Foundation.

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Source : BBC

#25 Collected Reading – Protest edition

Quote of the week

“The service of a good citizen is never useless : being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence, even his gait. ”
– Seneca


1.Why Establishment Media & the Power Elite Loathe Occupy Wall Street 

“The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

activism,culture,economics,Financial,global

Source :Dissenter.com

2. What’s behind the scorn for the Wall Street protests?

“Some of these critiques are ludicrous.  Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power — in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions — is destroying financial security for everyone else?”

activism,culture,economics,Financial,global

Source : Salon


3. Unequal Responsibility for Crime

“The case Mokhiber cited is not unique. In 1982 a study of America’s five hundred largest corporations reported that “23 percent of them had been convicted of a major crime or had paid more than $50,000 in penalties for serious misbehavior during the previous decade”

corporations,crime,politics,usa

Source :Truth Out

4. Freedom Riders Documentary PBS

“In 1908, journalist Ray Stannard Baker observed that “no other point of race contact is so much and so bitterly discussed among Negroes as the Jim Crow car.” As bus travel became widespread in the South over the first half of the 20th century, it followed the same pattern”

culture, race, USA, nonviolence

Source : PBS

5. Israelis plan million-strong march as protesters call for social justice

“It is certainly one of the largest street protests we have experienced in Israel,” said Tamar Hermann, of the Israel Democracy Institute. “But what really makes it different is its heterogeneous nature. Normally protest is homogeneous. Diversity is as important as size.”

democracy,israel,policy,politics,protest

Source : The Guardian

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#24 Collected Reading – Vehicles from around the world

A collection of vehicles I have found on our travels.


1.Red 5 San Francisco

Vespa, SF



2. Small and orange Cornwall UK

Fiat, Cornwall


3. VW’s Berlin

VW’s Berlin

4. Chiba Columbia

Chiba, Columbia

5. 5-0 SF

SF, 5-0

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#23 Collected Reading – Food edition

Quote of the week

This week I have collected together a series of recipe videos I made. Most of them were made on a recent visit to London in my mum’s kitchen.


1.Prawn curry

Indian, Curry, Prawns



2. Green bean curry

Indian, Curry, Green bean


3. Egg Curry

Indian, Curry, Egg

4. Chhas cool yogurt drink

Indian, Drink, Yogurt

5. The Best tomato sauce !

Italian, sauce, tomato

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#22 Collected Reading

Quote of the week

“It must be admitted, however, that life in More’s Utopia, as in most others, would be intolerably dull. Diversity is essential to happiness, and in Utopia there is hardly any. This is a defect of all planned social systems, actual as well as imaginary.”

— History of Western Philosophy (Routledge Classics) – by Bertrand Russell


1.Why start-ups won’t save us from recession

“Now of course Hoffa is a union boss and he would say that, wouldn’t he. But the point he raises is nevertheless sobering. Not only is patriotism a completely outmoded concept for major technology companies, but so also is the idea that these corporations have any wider social responsibility to the societies which provide them with the skilled and educated people who make them so innovative and profitable. Welcome to Tom Friedman’s flat world.”

culture,economics,policy, usa

Source :The Guardian

2. Jelly batteries break the mould

“The Leeds-based researchers are promising that their jelly batteries are as safe as polymer batteries, perform like liquid-filled batteries, but are 10 to 20% the price of either..”

environment,innovation, uk

Source : BBC


3. The Perfect Stimulus: Free, Politically Viable, and Deficit-Reducing

“Why would the Treasury want more longer-term debt? Let’s think of an analogy. Imagine that you had two loans: a 30-year mortgage fixed at 3% and a 1-year loan at 0.5% that you have to roll over annually. Although that one-year loan is cheaper now, you know that in a couple of years it will cost you more than 3% to continue to roll it over — and your spending habit won’t allow you to pay it off. As a result, it makes sense to consolidate that short-term loan into your mortgage if you are able.”

culture,economics,policy,usa

Source :The Atlantic Magazine

4. UK joins nuclear fusion project

“We were thinking: ‘what would be a way forward, how could Europe define a strategic route for laser power production to take advantage of these developments?’ And that was the kernel of Hiper.”

environment,innovation,uk

Source : BBC

5. Mental Abacus Does Away With Words

“Now studies on a group of children trained to use a “mental abacus” suggest the technique frees mathematics from its usual dependence on language.”

Asia,Mathmatics,Method,thinking

Source : New Scientist

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#21 Collected Reading

Quote of the week

“Brazil was the first country to pass a law guaranteeing a minimum income: in 2004, President Lula signed the law guaranteeing “an unconditional basic income, or citizenship income” for every Brazilian citizen or foreigner resident for five years or more. The payment will be of equal value, payable in monthly amounts and sufficient to cover “minimal expenses in food, housing, education and health care,” taking into account “the country’s level of development and budgetary possibilities.”

— Living in the End Times :by Slavoj Zizek


1.Sweden’s free school experiment 

“Osterman also doesn’t believe it’s necessarily a bad thing. “We are becoming a school for ambitious immigrants,” he said.
But as I was leaving his school, one of his students, Mohammed Mahmoud, put it differently. “This is a school for criminals,” he declared, to laughter. “Nobody’s working in this school, because no one here has any future.”

education,sweden,policy,culture

Source :The Guardian

2. What Do You Want to Say You’ve Done?

“Instead, base your career decisions (at least in part) on what hope to say when you look back on your life. You may not always succeed, but are unlikely to look back with regret on those decisions that gave you the opportunity to reach your aspirations.”

culture,life

Source : Harvard Business Review


3. Facebook and the Epiphanator: An End to Endings?

“I do not enjoy Facebook — I find it cloying and impossible — but I am there every day. Last year I watched a friend struggle through breast cancer treatment in front of hundreds of friends.”

media,culture,usa

Source :New York Magazine

4. UK riots were product of consumerism and will hit economy, says City broker

“The dominant ethos of ‘I buy, therefore I am’ needs to be challenged by a shift of emphasis from material to non-material values.”

capitalism,uk,riots,culture

Source : The Guardian

5. NYTimes: Where Pay for Chiefs Outstrips U.S. Taxes

“The authors of a new study said their findings suggested that current United States business policy was rewarding tax avoidance rather than innovation.”

economics,policy,tax rate,usa

Source : The New York Times

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#20 Collected Reading – 5 View points on the London Riots

Quote of the week

“If the Western world is still determined to rule mankind by force,” the 1945 conference declared, “then Africans as a last resort, may have to appeal to force in the effort to achieve freedom, even if force destroys them and the world.” The demand for freedom came alongside the demand for socialism: “We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth and industry for profit alone.”

-The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World –  by Vijay Prashad


1.Everywhere is a target, everywhere is symbolic 

“the riots and its crowd-logics that recalls the frenzy that characterises financial markets today. Indeed it’s a strange though not necessarily ironic coincidence that the Blackberry through its private messaging network, BBM, was it is claimed, the method of organising London’s riots allowing people to group and regroup with mystifying speed. Not so long ago, the Blackberry was the singular device that symbolised the world of modern business.”

Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Networks

Source :Domus

2. Teens are left to their own devices as council axes all youth services

“It’s just the boredom,” she says. “Boredom causes trouble.”

Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Economics

Source : The Guardian


3. Handmade hashtag. Impromptu bulletin board gives positive voice to riot-struck Londoners

“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers”

Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Community

Source :Eye Magazine

4. The year we realised our democratically elected leaders can no longer protect us

“The irony of all this is that outside Britain, Europe and the US, the great story of 2011 has been the Arab spring, as the people of Syria, Yemen and beyond have taken to the streets. It seems that just as those nations demand the tools of democracy, we are finding them rusting and blunt in our hands.”

Riots, UK, Politics, Policy, Culture, Democracy

Source : The Guardian

5. Thinking Allowed BBC Radio 4 – Liverpool Riots

“30 years ago riots broke out in Liverpool which lead to 160 arrests and 258 police officers needing hospital treatment. The four days of street battles, arson and looting lead to violent disturbances in many other British cities and have changed community relations and disorder policing in the country forever.”

Riots, Liverpool, Politics, Culture

Source : BBC Thinking Allowed

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik

#19 Collected Reading

Quote of the week

“To describe a problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as promoted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more create the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means : to pick out determing elements and combining them.”

-Karl Gerstner


1.What Jaron Lanier Thinks of Technology Now

“These arguments have proved popular. The book has received admiring reviews in the Times and (twice) in The New York Review of Books. In the months after “Gadget” was published, Lanier lectured at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, travelled to Seoul to speak at a major conference about innovation, and made Time’s list of the hundred “most influential people in the world.” At the South by Southwest Interactive conference, in Austin, in March of 2010, Lanier gave a talk, before which he asked his audience not to blog, text, or tweet while he was speaking. He later wrote that his message to the crowd had been: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”

Technology, USA, Culture, Design

Source :The New Yorker

2. Blog Archive Better (and more) Social Bonuses

“While they were purchasing a gift for a teammate, they also became more interested in their teammate and were happier to help them further in multiple other ways.”

Business, USA, Culture, collaboration

Source : Dan Ariely


3. Handmade hashtag. Impromptu bulletin board gives positive voice to riot-struck Londoners

“My immediate neighbour was drawn to the A4 sheet saying ‘we should be producers, not just consumers’.”

Culture, Community, London, Public, Memorial

Source :Eye Magazine

4. Examining the Limitations of a Neoliberal Safety Net: Romney’s Unemployment Insurance Savings Accounts

“rightfully in my humble opinion, ignore this because the government isn’t doing what the government is best at – absorbing risks.  All the government is doing is setting the stage for the individual to confront the entirety of their economic risks by themselves.”

Economics, USA, Culture, Policy

Source : Rortybomb

5. The Motorcycle Gangs

“they know it—and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”

Gangs, Culture, Media, USA, politics

Source : The Nation

Hope you like this collection. Please comment, share and most of all enjoy.

– Kaushik