In the third world, 4 million children die every year within a month of birth. It’s an avoidable tragedy If half of those children were simply kept warm and clean they would survive. In the developed world we have incubators that do exactly that. I spent the first week of my life in one. And […]
The Great Christmas Scam
It is all a nasty little trick, don’t believe a word of it. It goes something like this: When I was little, I was told that on the evening of the 24th December Father Christmas leaves his home (near the North Pole) with his trusty flight of reindeer and whizzes around the world, climbing up and […]
Fat Fingers and Process Bottlenecks
All processes have a bottleneck, a rate limiting step, something that stops them from going further faster. It is really important to know what the bottle neck is, because unless you open the bottleneck you will never get any better. Let’s take the mobile computer as an example. I am sitting on a train writing […]
How to Outclass an Old Bloke
I went for a run along the banks of the Thames this morning, right through central London. Fabulous views, enough to get the most hardened coach potato out of his chair. I was going fine until an old bloke overtook me, he wasn’t going much faster, but he was much older. My ego cut in, […]
Customers are a Pain in the Back
Service is all about flexibility and being able to accommodate your customer’s every whim. Or is it? If you go into a delicatessen you expect them to be able to give you a chicken piri piri brown baguette with extra pineapple, hold the mayo. That is flexibility, that is great service. But once you have […]