I have been in tech recruiting for the best part of 25 years now, and I can safely say it’s an industry that systemically overrates technical ability and underrates behaviour. Invariably, issues that arise within technical businesses – and, really, in any business – don’t come down to technical competence (i.e. what people know) but have everything to do with behaviour (i.e. what people do).
There is no magic formula, but there is a need for us, as architects, to take a systematic approach to workplace design and organise our thinking in a way that successfully negotiates the sometimes conflicting relationship between an organisation, its people and the buildings they inhabit.
I’m a serial entrepreneur and with that career (and lifestyle!) choice there are invariably a number of lessons picked up along the way. Some come from successes, but more often I find failure breeds the most important learnings. At 25 I started a music studio in Devon, borrowing £50k from my parents to get the business started. I had no plan and it went bust. I had to have a difficult conversation with Dad, when he taught me the most valuable lesson of my life: never give up. That message has stuck with me and I have realised even significant failures are just part of the process if you can find a way to manage the risk and learn from them for the next time.
Steve King
C0-Founder | Black Swan Data
Though Prodigy Finance has now extended over $325 million in student loans, the company began, humbly, over a couple of beers. My INSEAD colleagues and I sat around, nodding our heads in complete understanding as we chatted about the difficulties we experienced in finding the funds to pursue our MBAs.
We weren’t an anomaly. As many as 82% of Prodigy Finance-funded masters students have no alternative sources of educational financing. They’ve been accepted into top universities to pursue advanced degrees with potential for exceptional salaries – and banks can’t take that into account.
If you had told me 10 or 20 years ago that I was going to be an entrepreneur and CEO, running a company with 20 employees, I really don’t think I would have believed you. I’ve been a journalist all of my life. I love being a journalist and I really thought that’s what I would do until the end – I joked that I’d go out of the newsroom feet first. But the thing about growing older is that what you want out of life changes.
Thirty-three years is a really long run in journalism. I had a career that exceeded my dreams in every way: reporting from more than 40 countries. I covered many of the biggest stories of our time and I reported on Latin America for ten years. I witnessed real horror as a war correspondent in Iraq and in Libya and elsewhere. I am still haunted by images of the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake. But there were many moments that were simply thrilling: documentaries on penguins in Patagonia and environmental issues in the Galapagos.
Acast’s business is fundamentally changing audio for everyone. 1 in 5 mobile queries, according to Google, are now voice searches, which is an incredible indicator of the growing power of audio. Our technology platform is making it easier than ever for content creators to make great audio and share it with the world. We’re fascinated by content that’s completely different from anything heard before, and we see a future where our technology continuously learns what interests you, and seamlessly delivers the audio you want across different formats.
Commentators have talked about the death of the high street for several years now, and indeed the market continues to change as customers change their shopping habits with the continued rise of online. Whilst as the high street as we know it, stuffed with large chain retailers, ancient technology and products you can find anywhere, is suffering, this in turn is creating an opportunity for a new wave of independent boutiques and retail spaces. With more independent shops opening than closing in 2016[1], the large chain retailers are no longer providing the shopping experience customers are after. With online retail here to stay, the future of retail is changing to encompass the best of the online and offline worlds, focusing on consumer experience more than ever before.
As the shift to the digital banking grows, financial institutions are facing new challenges.
Global banking fraud is up 26% (£800m in UK) over the last year and the problem is getting worse as customers continue to move to mobile banking.
Imagine running a company built to service Fortune 100 clients in a highly strategic and creative way. Imagine running that company without empathy, kindness and care of your employees, a place where no one says thank you and no one cares if someone is crying in the bathroom. Truly, try to imagine running that company without paying attention to the heartbeat of the culture. There is not a person reading this that would raise their hand to work at said company. There is not one person that would jump at the chance to spend 8-10 hours a day at a company built with no soul.
At HealthUnlocked, whilst we do not focus on people’s genes in the same way Genetics Sciences do, we are building information systems that effectively describe people’s relationships with their health, both as individual and collectives.
Our work aims to understand what each of our millions of users health needs and interests are when coming to our platform, so we can map and describe healthcare from their point of view. The most exciting part of this exercise is that we have the opportunity to create a completely new way of describing health, which in turn fundamentally opens up new routes for research.
