Polemic

On sleeping (or not)

By Dave Snowden  ·  March 29, 2013  ·  Polemic

One of those nightmare flights that you get from time to time.  It started badly with the One World Lounges in Changi Airport undergoing refurbishment so everyone was packed into Turkish Airlines lounge.  I'd planned a shower and G&T in the BA FIrst Class lounge (thanks to high status cards, not class of travel) but it was not to be.  So I ended up getting on the plane, frazzeled, hot and sweaty.

Flying with Finn Air via Helsinki is always pot luck as they have both modern and ancient planes.  Tonight we had one of the oldest....

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Cutting through a weave destroys it

By Dave Snowden  ·  March 26, 2013  ·  Polemic

Last Thursday night saw a Rugby dinner sponsored by KPMG and the British Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.  It's a good Curry do with conversation (on our table at least) based on some knowledge of the sport.  I admit the humour of a second rate Northern Comedian and the rank sexism of one former player grated at times.  You don't need much intelligence to watch soccer, but Rugby takes a brain and you would hope that brains could move on from such crudity.  But it seems a part of the culture and its starting to die out so I can live...

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The new Calvinists

By Dave Snowden  ·  March 22, 2013  ·  Polemic, Reflections

I don't think I ever repeat a presentation, but over time certain elements stay constant, then new ideas are tried and refined.  The best time for this is when I get a series of presentations within days of each other to very different audiences.  Telling and retelling over short time scales refines ideas and often creates them.

In Hong Kong this week I had three presentations within the week, two of which are now posted with yesterday's date and one of which awaits us sorting out the load issues on large files.   One of the key...

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Control is key in managing a CAS

By Dave Snowden  ·  March 10, 2013  ·  Polemic, Reflections

I really apologise for the opening picture, but it was too good not to use.   Yesterday I picked up a tweet from Glenda Eoyang in which she said In complex system the trick is to give up control to succeed.  Counterintuitive?  Depends on your intuition.   Now for reasons I will elaborate shortly, I think that sort of statement harms the adoption of complexity and is in any event wrong.  So I responded with Disagree profoundly with you there. The issue is what you control, not control to which I should probably have added of itself....

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Babies & bathwater again

By Dave Snowden  ·  February 26, 2013  ·  Polemic

I picked up a great tweet from Umair Haque yesterday(@umairh and a hat-tip to Jules for the link): Maybe I'll start an anti-TED, with three-hour-long in-depth talks about Great Ideas. Oh, wait. It's called "A University".  I retweeted it, resisting the temptation to amend It's called to It was called.  Now in parallel with this I have being dealing with some of the ideological dancing around how a conference should be structured and reading reports of the Italian elections which seems to have discovered a old form of oratory,...

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