Neil Perkin

I'll likely get flamed for this but I'm not convinced that this is such a great idea. Setting up a walled off space with copious screens showing visualisations of data streamed from social media monitoring systems seems to be the new new thing. I have no doubt that the objectives behind it - listening and paying attention to customers - are laudable ones. But do you need a room to do it? If I'm honest, the thing that bothers me is (once again) the choice of language.

After writing about Agile Budgeting, I stumbled serendipitously (as is the way with these things) on a Tom Fishburne post about Waterfall Planning that echoed some of the points I was making. Specifically, how crafting an annual plan is "like getting a bill through Congress", what with all the hours of spreadsheet crunching, debate, negotiation, and compromise, followed by more of the same, before eventually settling on "a plan that is wrong the moment it's inked". Tom goes on to mention Ian Sanders, who gave a talk on Unplanning at last years SXSW (there's also a short e-book here if you're interested).

I make no apology for writing another post on agility. I think it's one of the most fundamental (and often unacknowledged) shifts that businesses need to make in order to be fit for purpose in the world in which we find ourselves. We no longer need to follow the model of creating a perfectly crafted plan, spending a lot of time executing that plan before we ship it, and only then finding out whether it is successful or not.

There was an Economist piece on Innovation a while back on Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble's new book “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge”, dealing largely with innovation in established companies. There's much focus on ideas generation these days, perhaps more so than on what innovation really is: the commercialisation of those ideas. The perspiration stuff, not the inspiration stuff.

As part of my ongoing obsession with all things agile, I've written up a summary of some key practices around Agile Marketing, building on the principles outlined in The Agile Manifesto. This is also cross posted over on The Marketing Society blog: