The Product Mindset

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Over the years, I have been lucky enough to have held engineering and product roles across very different companies. I have worked in industry sectors as diverse as energy, automotive, big tech, consumer devices, and most recently, government. If I have learned one thing in this journey is that context is everything. What works for one organisation may not be the best fit for a very different one. For example, the product and engineering practices required to produce a highly … Read more…

AI and the Future of Work

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A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky to spend some time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, attending seminars at MIT and Harvard. (That’s one off the bucket list). While there, we had the opportunity to attend a fascinating panel discussion on possible futures of how AI will shape the future of work. I was particularly thrilled that the panellists included Ethan Mollick, one of the best commentators on AI, and Daron Acemoglu, author of an incomparable history of technology. This blog … Read more…

What does AI mean for university education?

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This weekend, Geoffrey Hinton, who pioneered the field of deep learning and one of the so-called ‘godfathers of AI’, gave a wide-ranging interview to the Financial Times [1] (link behind a paywall). In it, he painted a rather gloomy picture of how AI is going to change the world. He said, “Rich people are going to use AI to replace workers. It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits.” We should treat these words with caution. … Read more…

How AI is changing engineering

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I’ve been writing this blog intermittently for around ten years, exploring questions that intrigued me from a professional perspective. I started off exploring the then-emerging Internet of Things space in the early 2010s, during which time I took on roles building smart home and connected car products. Over the years, it evolved into a broader exploration of themes related to leading tech teams, while occasionally keeping an eye on advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence. In this blog post, … Read more…

Fog and Friction – The limitations of strategy when dealing with uncertainty

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This blog post is a work-in-progress… Military history and grand strategy have long offered sources of inspiration to business leaders. In a previous blog on the subject, I touched on how the insights of historical figures such as Sun Tzu remain relevant to those navigating the fast-moving tech space. In that blog I made no mention of Carl von Clausewitz, one of the most pre-eminent and well-known military theorists. Here I try to make up for that omission. The Fog … Read more…

Artificial Intelligence Good Reads (Part 2)

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This blog post continues a list of articles, sources and papers on artificial intelligence that I started in 2023 (see here). The post became a bit too long and unwieldy to maintain in a single page, so have broken it out for the start of 2024. Enjoy! Some AI Forecasts for 2024 (1) Alberto Romano, who maintains a thoughtful blog called Algorithmic Bridge, observes that the benchmark LLM at the end of 2023 was GPT-4, which was built in 2022, … Read more…

A rising tide – creating a learning organisation

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These days, unless you happen to work for a tech-native firm, you will struggle to avoid being drawn into some form of digital transformation initiative. From manufacturing digitalisation to the creation of wholly digital customer interaction channels and everything associated with websites or mobile apps, digital transformation is a veritable cash cow of the management consultancy industry. Globally it is worth over $50 billion a year in revenues [1] and this is forecast to grow to over $200 billion by … Read more…

Even more Digital Transformation Must-Read Books

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As I have mentioned before in the preface to a similar collection of books, I remain embarrassed by the “Digital Transformation” title of this little series of book reviews, as it really conjures images of management consultants selling snake oil. Nevertheless, having started with this moniker, I will stick with it, and hope that the title doesn’t put you off too much. Here is a collection of titles I have read over the past year or so. It is somewhat … Read more…

ChatGPT according to ChatGPT

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It has been impossible to miss or ignore the hype about ChatGPT in any of my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds or business magazines. Clearly at the peak of a hype cycle, much has been written about the transformative effect generative AI language models will have on industries as diverse as search, law, book-writing and software development. It was therefore time to understand a bit better the inner workings of Chat GPT, OpenAI’s language model underpinning Microsoft’s new foray into Internet … Read more…

How Ukraine is fighting and winning the digital war

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In responding to the Russian invasion, Ukraine is making full use of its advantage in the technology space, using technologies and cultures that will be very familiar to anyone working in tech. In this post I look at the importance of an open innovation culture and how this can provide a decisive advantage.

Electric Cars. Will they make any difference to the planet?

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A few months back, I wrote a blog post describing a road trip I went on with my family to the Scottish Highlands this summer. The aim of the article was not to show the world what a great time we had. That is what Instagram and Facebook are for if I were so inclined. Instead, I was curious to explore the viability of electric cars for more arduous journeys. Is an electric car any good outside its comfort zone … Read more…

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