Former Apple luminary and current entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki enjoys a sublime reputation in the business world: when he speaks, people listen.

I’m fairly new to all this highfalutin hi-tech business malarkey myself, but I don’t impress easily. Primarily because it seems to me that there’s a supernumerary of these business gurus swanning around the internet rewording established truisms and peddling them as their own. Continue reading…

Often one of the consequences of living a physically demanding working life means countering the hardship by partying vigorously. The ‘work hard, play hard’ adage applied to me in great heaping shovelfuls. A lot of my Bacchanalian antics would horrify those of a more genteel disposition, indeed I have no doubt if a lot of my colleagues and friends weren’t similarly predisposed to whooping it up there would have likely been a litany of interventions, arrests, restraining orders, GPS tracking devices and frequent deployments of the National Guard. Continue reading…

Unless you’ve being living under a sizeable boulder, you’ll have seen Game of Thrones, the HBO dramatization of the first book of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy magnum opus, A Song of Ice and Fire.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s the best thing on TV, I reckon, by far. I’ve studied more than my fair share of medieval history, and I nod at every nuance he introduces with his narrative. I’ve read the books too, because books are always better if one’s imagination is worth a damn. Continue reading…

Up until a handful of years ago, I’d spent a couple of decades working in the male-dominated industry of construction, so one might expect my attitude towards female workers to be somewhat misogynistic. This couldn’t be further from the truth, however. I firmly believe in equality, I simply hadn’t been exposed to it professionally. I had, however, assumed the office space would have, over the same time period, developed into an egalitarian environment, where the physical advantages of the male physique are surplus to the job description. I imagined paper-pushing required little more than robustly hefting a mouse or daringly pirouetting a swivel chair. Continue reading…

Something I’ve suspected for quite a long time is apparently true: America is full of dumb people.

The research that spawned this article provides tangible evidence to back my notion of a country full of drooling simpletons.

We’re not all lackwits, don’t get me wrong, and this bulge in the bell curve is not unique to our fair shores, it’s just we have the biggest one. Continue reading…

Twenty-five years ago I turned up at a new laboring job as part of a crew refurbishing a large hotel. My first task was to cut electrical chases in the walls. I finished up the room I’d been assigned and went to see the electrician to ask where we needed me next. He didn’t believe I’d finished so quickly and followed me over to check my work.

“You’ve got to slow down, son.”

”Excuse me?” I examined my chases to see if I’d been careless in my haste.

“You’ve got to slow down. If the foreman sees how fast you’re going, you’ll make the rest of us look bad. Take your time. We’re all working by the hour, right?” Continue reading…

I just came back from watching Act of Valor, the new movie starring actual serving US Navy SEALs in the main roles.

Of course, as a prodigious online player of video games like Modern Warfare 3 and its ilk, I’m extremely familiar with the equipment and tactics used by these tip of the spear warriors, so you can imagine my disappointment as I sifted through the film’s glaring inaccuracies:

Not once did I hear the word noob. Continue reading…

Half a million jobs have been invented in the creation of mobile apps. An entirely new industry has sprung up purely to make these fiddly little programs for our handhelds, and it’s changing the world rapidly.

Remember when we used to get lost? Or when we used to wish we’d brought our cameras? Or when we wondered whether we were getting a good deal? Or when we physically traveled to stores? What did we formerly do on long journeys without music, movies, a library of ebooks and the World Wide Web? We used to carry a leafy sheaf of papers printed with words, that’s what we did. Good lord. Continue reading…

I started realizing, after my last blog, that we may be on the brink of an important precedent governing how candid we can be on the internet.

Preceding the ostracism and eventual resignation of an HR executive at BG Group for posting his openness to other professional opportunities on his Linkedin profile, numerous individuals had been arrested and imprisoned for incitement to riot during the recent London troubles. Continue reading…