Search Results for: because+of+rather+than+with

Thanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which [...]

[This is a follow-up to the post I wrote late last night; thank you very much for your comments, Likes, RTs, +1s and Shares. Active and visible feedback is a great motivator, and helps me learn to write about the right things and in the right ways]. Where was I? Oh yes. Why am I [...]

Born in 1957, raised as part of a liberal and progressive family in Calcutta, schooled by the Jesuits from 1965-66 to 1978-79: there is much in my background to explain why I espouse many of the beliefs of the Sixties. It begins with my family and my faith; it manifests itself in how I’m passionate [...]

There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to write this post. The internet was not, and is not, solely a new distribution mechanism for Hollywood and for pockets of the music industry; but the power of these incumbents is immense in the Western world, and it is therefore possible, perhaps even likely, that bad [...]

[This post continues from where I left off in the early hours of this morning, here]. I’ve been following the work of W Brian Arthur for over three decades now, starting with his paper on “Samuelson, Population and Intergenerational Transfers” in 1978 or thereabouts, while I was reading Economics at university. During the 1980s, he [...]

As most of you know, I was born and raised in Calcutta; I spent my first 23 years there, fifteen of them being educated by the Jesuits. Calcutta, where, from 1977 to 2010, there was a “democratically elected communist government”. And the Jesuits, with their focus on promoting social justice. Between the two, they made [...]

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi: Toyotomi Hideyoshi returning to the scene of his army’s victory It’s that time of year when I get asked to make predictions for the year ahead, particularly in the context of enterprise software. It’s that time of year when I tend not to do anything as a result. But this year’s different. This [...]

I must have been around 13 when I had my first pizza, courtesy of my neighbours, a warm and friendly Sephardic Jewish family; Flower Silliman, the mother of the family, was, and continues to be, an incredible cook; I took the family to India for a reunion last year, and we had Christmas lunch (!) [...]

At school and at university, I was reminded by teachers not to allow the knowledge I’d accumulated to constrain unduly my thinking about the future. There was something liberating about the mere process of trying to understand that knowledge could be considered a constraint, a liberation that continued throughout my life, evinced at different times [...]

Over a decade ago, after a couple of years as Deputy CIO, I was appointed Global CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort in May 2001. Times were hard, and my brief was harder still: to reduce technology capital expenditure and operating expenses by 50% within eighteen months, while providing “leadership, stability and continuity” to the organisation. At [...]

All projects involve change, an outcome of some sort that can be measured as a difference between the initial state and the end state of something. All change involves risk. At a level of abstraction, project management may be seen as the means by which something is progressed from initial state to end state while [...]

I’ve been wanting to write this post for some months now, ever since I gave a talk on gamification in the enterprise in New York sometime in June. You can see the video of the talk here. Yet I didn’t write it. Because I didn’t particularly want to add to the hype, or for that [...]

…. And it’s only the giving/that makes you/what you are Jethro Tull, Wond’ring Aloud (Ian Anderson). From the album Aqualung [Note: this is a continuation from my post a couple of days ago, linked to here. I began that post with the first line of the song, it is only fitting that I begin this [...]

Excerpt from the Times, 20th November 1997: An elderly couple drove nearly 100 miles from Portsmouth to BBC Thames Valley Radio in Caversham, Berkshire, to visit their local web site. They had seen an advert inviting them to visit the BBC web site, and had imagined it was a building. That was fourteen years ago, [...]

[Disclaimer: As most of you know, I work for salesforce.com, and have been doing so since October 2010; you will also know that it is not my style to write corporate plugs on this blog, and I'm not going to start with this one. I've written it for two reasons. One, if you're interested in [...]

Introduction In Steve Rosenbaum’s Curation Nation, Esther Dyson quotes Bill Gates as saying “The future of search is verbs”. Esther goes on to say that nobody really looks for something per se, they look for things in order to do something. Action. When Marc Benioff elucidates his vision for the Social Enterprise, he stresses the [...]

[Note: This is a follow-up to my earlier post on Curation in the Enterprise, and seeks to develop some of the themes introduced there.] First, a quick recap. Machines can filter. Only humans can curate. When a human curates, she does three things. She selects something (or things) from a larger group. She organises those [...]

[Esther Dyson, Clay Shirky, Marc Benioff and David Weinberger, people I consider as friends, have said and written things that have influenced this post considerably; the curated conversations between Umberto Eco and Jean-Claude Carriere, as recorded in This Is Not The End Of The Book, have also been very influential. Finally, Steven Rosenbaum's excellent Curation [...]

[Note: This is my third post in a series I've been writing on this topic; the two previous posts immediately precede this one]. What I want to do here is touch on a few subjects that came up in earlier posts, where I didn’t really have the time or space to express what I meant [...]

Introduction This post is a follow-up to one I wrote a few days ago; based on the twitter and mail feedback, and on the comments I’ve received via blog and facebook, it seemed worthwhile to continue discussions on this train of thought. Summary of previous post Let me first summarise where I was trying to [...]

This is a post recommending that you buy a particular book. Now I’ve written many book reviews in the past, recommended that you read many books in the past. So what’s so different about this particular book? What makes it special? Well, first off, I haven’t actually read the book. There’s a good reason for [...]

Prologue Given the depth and nature of conversations on this subject, I think I’d better let this one run for a while. Many of you have commented in different ways, by writing in, by talking to me, by commenting on this blog, or on Facebook or Twitter, or even by writing blog posts and pointing [...]

Origins of “social objects” Nearly four years ago, Jyri Engestrom introduced us to the concept of social objects, and Hugh Macleod built on that theme, and what they said really resonated with me. As a result, I’ve been writing about social objects for a while, as you can see here from three years ago here, [...]

Beginnings: congregations and stories As long as humankind has existed, humankind has congregated. And whenever humankind has congregated, humans have used the opportunity to follow their passions and dreams, to tell the world their stories, to connect with others to make their dreams reality. Sometimes those dreams went against the grain of the society they [...]