This year I edited another book, worked on fascinating projects at Fluxx, and learned many learnings. Every day, one million people upload pictures of their coffee grinds to the Turkish app Faladdin and get a personalised fortune reading back in 15 minutes. [Kaya Genç] In the early 19th century, cowpox…

The first part of Peter Jackson’s epic Beatles documentary Get Back is a masterclass in facilitation and creative management. Paul McCartney tries a stoned, grumpy band through writing, arranging, recording and performing dozens of songs within a short deadline. He’s using the Design Thinking playbook, 20 years before it was…

How organisations are creating movements for change — Back in early 2020, as the pandemic hit, businesses found themselves turned upside down almost overnight. Companies delivered a decade’s worth of digital transformation in a week. We all changed the way we work, probably forever. As customer priorities changed, companies changed their products and services, faster than they’d ever…

Sharon Cooper of the The Economist Intelligence Unit on AI, building new products and taking Thursday night drinks global Experimenting with new ideas inside one of the world’s most recognisable brands is never going to be easy. Enter Sharon Cooper; Chief Digital Office at The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Sharon has incredible foresight and a brilliant track record of experimenting and leading change with a clear focus on modernising…

This year I edited another book, worked on fascinating projects at Magnetic, and learned many learnings. Most cities plant only male trees because it’s expensive to clear up the fruit that falls from female trees. Male trees release pollen, and that’s one of the reasons your hay fever is getting…

Ambient home cinema was the perfect lockdown project — In December 2018, Bryan Boyer published “Creating a Very Slow Movie Player.” It’s a wonderful essay about light and Brasília and architecture. Boyer describes building an e-paper display that shows films at 24 frames per hour, rather than 24 frames per second. …

This year I’ve been thinking about scale. Miniaturisation is unstoppable, but maybe there’s a way we can have our cake and eat it. —

This year I edited another book, worked on fascinating projects at Magnetic, and learned many learnings. [NPR’s Planet Money covered this year’s list in Episode 959: Things We Learned in 2019] Each year humanity produces 1,000 times more transistors than grains of rice and wheat combined. [Mark P Mills] The…

This year Magnetic helped launch Vogue Business, the new global business service from Condé Nast International. Ciara Byrne, Director of Business Development, talks about building a culture of innovation inside a complex, fast-moving organisation. — Tom Whitwell (Magnetic) When we first met about a year ago, how developed was the idea that became Vogue Business? Ciara We’d been looking at business-to-business as an idea for Condé Nast International. So many different teams around the world had looked at different B2B ideas: products, services, editorial. So…