Our priority actions to sustain [Blah] in [Blah] and to improve
the [Blah] for our customers underpin our mission
to [Blah] as well as being [Blah]
to encouraging our customers to [Blah] ... oh, I could do a lot of damage with this.

strategy-madlibs.herokuapp.com
->
Ah, looks like the damage has already been done -
X : Isn't this the fault of COVID?
Me : Some companies are growing during physical isolation. COVID has simply accelerated the path we were already on. It's a forcing function. There are few genuine examples of "our brilliant strategy would have worked if it wasn't for covid" ...
... instead, it has exposed weak management that has failed to adapt over time and is found wanting, unable to cope. Alas, those same people rarely pay the cost of their failure. My sympathy is with those who have suffered under such leadership and have now lost livelihoods.
X : What about small companies.
Me : There are some exceptions as always, some have adapted, some have been exposed to some pretty sharp and horrible practices by larger players.
X : You don't have much sympathy for companies.
Me : My sympathy is with people. That's where I would focus support. Companies are an instrument, a form of collective, a way of organising. They are a useful tool much like the market is a useful tool but secondary to society.
X : What about small companies whose business models have been taken away? Weddings?
Me : The self employed seem to have been mostly thrown to the wolves. Focus on the needs of people ... first and always.

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More from @swardley

2 Dec
X : Where is meritocracy on your culture map?
Me : Meritocracy is a dangerous one. First up, it's belief i.e. a value that a collective (a group, an organisation, a nation) might share. All collectives want to succeed in spreading their values, it's their purpose ...
... like all values then meritocracy is tied to both behaviour (how you act to support your values) and the landscape.

This is where the problems start ... Image
... many collectives believe they are successful at being meritocratic (value) but in fact, the landscape (what is happening) is anything but meritocratic. This leads to behaviour which can be highly discriminatory i.e. assumption that anyone can make it if they work hard enough!
Read 11 tweets
2 Dec
X : How do you undermine values in a collective? Using your map?
Me : Why do you want to know?
X : Corbyn? Socialism? Getting people to vote against policies that were in their favour.
Me : Not a topic I want to talk about.
X : Because you can't?
Me : Oh, reverse me? Go on ...
... you take the values you don't like and you associate them strongly with some person (a cult of X). Then you destroy the behaviour of that person pointing to how it is counter to some of the values held. You don't stop until you've destroyed them. Basic statecraft. Image
X : Are you saying Corbyn is a liability?
Me : I think the world of Corbyn, he is a hero to many including me. But he is a liability, he has been played and the very values he stood for could be brought down by the continued focus on him. The party and its values matter more.
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec
X : Favourite cloud quote?
Me : Hmmm. Tough one. Probably 2012, a £2bn revenue company whose CIO's response to cloud was "to buy more Oracle licenses"
X : What happened?
Me : They are no longer in business.
X : Another?
Me : A company's $1.2bn private cloud effort. I said I could deliver the same result for $20m. How? Pay me $20m to sit on a beach drinking and in five years I'll phone up to say "we failed".
X : And?
Me : 5 years later they said "wish we paid you $20m".
X : Another?
Me : What is this? Drag up all the skeletons? Old hat. The largest hardware vendors in the world are all cloud companies - Amazon, Alibaba, MSFT, Google - that's the real world we live in. There are still some pining for lost times but it's a dull conversation.
Read 7 tweets
1 Dec
X : Do you play computer games?
Me : Sometimes, not often. Why?
X : Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077?
Me : Hmmm ... not something I will look at for at least a year or two and then I'll decide whether to play it or not depending upon the size of the modding community.
X : Really?
...
Me : Yep. If I want fun combined with useful management training then I'd play Eve Online. If I just want fun then I'll want to mod the game to exactly how I want the world to be. A game which is just someone else's vision and narrative is ... well ... dull.
X : Did you play Witcher 3?
Me : Hmmm, for a couple of hours. Honestly, I found that 3rd person perspective tedious. Not my thing. Skyrim SE / Fallout 4 are far more interesting because of the modding community.
Read 5 tweets
30 Nov
X : Your table on next gen practices?
Me : You mean this one? It's from 2010, published in 2011. Not really next gen today.
X : The chaos engines bit.
Me : Netflix Chaos Monkey, Amazon's "Master of Disaster" (early to mid 2000's), old manufacturing concept ...
... the constant drive towards ever greater levels of resilience through the constant introduction of random failures and chaos.
X : Is that the same as adaptation?
Me : Not quite. Adaptation is a much broader concept including themes like inheritance, mutation, exaptation ...
... but in general, nature (as a whole system) is the most resilient system we know. It has both engineering and ecological resilience. CS Hollings work is definitely worth a read.
Read 16 tweets
30 Nov
I have multiple UPS covering critical systems (server + network) plus my Tesla battery connected to solar ... switching off main power, everything keeps running (even over the 100ms switch of the distribution board) ... happy bunny. Three power cuts in last year (I live in UK).
X : Server?
Me : My desktop. Beefed up system, liquid cooled, decent graphic card, multiple networks (I triplicate traffic over three lines to a server in London to cope with poor networks) ... it gives me a solid base to connect to all my cloudy services (where work is done).
The weakness in the cloudy world is not cloud services - we can architect highly resilient systems (because of low MttR) across multiple zones - instead the problem has always been my connection to it (i.e. the home) both in networks and the odd power cut here and then.
Read 6 tweets

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