Personal

Who is Diamond Geezer?

The little I know about one of the best bloggers to have ever blogged.

Read
Agile

An Agile glossary

An A-Z of Agile frameworks, concepts and buzzwords.

Read
Personal

Four steps to clean cleaning

The how and the why of my eco-friendly cleaning journey.

Read
Technology

Waterfall or straw man?

The whole Waterfall vs Agile comparison is a sham. Here's why.

Read
Technology

PSM1... and done

I got certified as a Scrum Master, and I have some thoughts on how I got there.

Read
Art

11 gallery entrances in Paris

Being in lockdown made me miss travelling, and reminisce about intimidating entrances to commercial galleries in Paris. So I ranked them.

Read
Product Management

Epic documentation

Agile documentation needs to do the minimum viable job. Docs shouldn’t be comprehensive, but they should still exist. Here's an example.

Read
Personal

Notes from a march

Bollocks to Brexit - it’s gone beyond words, beyond a political strategy. It doesn’t relate to any future referendum. I’d argue it has gone beyond revoking article 50. It’s an incantation, and it's taken deep root in the minds of these people.

Read
Culture

Scream, Queen! It’s Freddy’s Revenge

Here’s a far from exhaustive list of all the times this sweat-drenched, leather-clad, budgie-frying 80s shocker proved its status as a beyond-camp classic.

Read
Personal

Swimming at the Elephant

I hadn’t swum for 20 years before joining the club a few months back. Now, I leave a brightly-lit council-run pool in Elephant and Castle each Wednesday night with a definite spring in my step.

Read
Advertising

Not-so-hot coral

It’s always a pain when an ad isn’t worthy of what’s being advertised. Which is why seeing this spot from Monzo the other day felt like a particularly hard kick to the stomach.

Read
Personal

8 life lessons from Amanda Lepore

Here are some tips from the documentary movie I Hate New York, and via trans icon Amanda Lepore, that you might or might not want to try at home.

Read
Tech

Google and the disappearing stars

What’s the value exchange between me and Google? Not a question I gave a second thought to... until I noticed a few disappearing yellow stars.

Read
Technology

132 Days of Duolingo

I spend around 10 minutes a day on Duolingo and I’m not convinced it’s worth it. And the fact these doubts only started occurring to me after I completed a 100 day streak on this maddeningly well-designed and moreish app is… annoying.

Read
Business

The four types of agency-client relationships

Agency/client relationships are getting ever more fraught these days. Anselmo Ramos is here to help.

Read
Product Management

Stop being a Product Martyr!

Being a product manager means that you have a lot of responsibility, but no authority.

Read
Art

Why I’m getting Artangled

I went to a lot of art shows in 2017. I don’t really know why this obsession took hold.

Read
Economy

Lessons from a crisis

Alistair Darling was in charge of the nation’s finances when the biggest financial crisis in a generation hit in 2007. This crisis, for him, led to political developments, culminating, in our age, with Brexit, and in the US, with Trump.

Read
Art

The White Bottle

Giorgio Morandi's paintings don’t really tell the full story of his life; and his life doesn’t explain his paintings.

Read
Strategy

5 things I’ve learned about the Future of Strategy

While it was a real passion project, it was also based on a big user need: the company’s hardcore fans are planners at ad and media agencies, yet within the marketing industry as a whole, the planning discipline is little-understood and often overlooked.

Read
Business

What’s the purpose of brand purpose?

With so many heart-warming, CSR-led ads winning awards these days, setting a purpose seems to have become almost a prerequisite for launching a big brand campaign. But many in adland would say these wins are due more to tugging on judges’ heartstrings rather than demonstrating great creativity or solid business results.

Read
Personal

Miss Naysmith and her city

As London’s super-rich make the city their playground, pushing the rest of us further and further to its social – and physical – margins, I think it’s becoming more and more important to remember stories like Miss Naysmith’s. She’s an example of somebody who refused to be pushed out. She lived on nobody else’s terms but her own.

Read
Strategy

How marketers can make people focus

The standout for me was a problem that’s always bedevilled advertisers with a message to get across: once you get people’s attention, how do you keep it?

Read
Personal

Walking somewhere

I’d arrived in Trieste on a Friday evening, and, having dropped my backpack off, I needed to walk. So I set off, towards the sea.

Read
Personal

Cat guardians

The beginning of the end of my 2016 came when I spent three days in Athens, alone.

Read