July 2010
1 post
Measurement Camp →
There were some really interesting insights to be found at Measurement Camp yesterday: I would recommend keeping an eye on the events for the the next one.
February 2010
1 post
Capturing Business Processes
A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to attend an excellent lecture by Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, at the Saïd Business School. Amoung his many observations, the one that particularly struck me is the assertion that there are two reasons that Tesco have been able to maintain high profit margins compared to its competitors. These are Moore’s law and though a drive to increase...
October 2009
1 post
Watch
August 2009
2 posts
What Richard Arkwright can teach us about Business...
Last week, I was lucky enough to visit Cromford Mill, which is the site of a cotton mill that is considered by many to be the first example of a factory. The site, which unfortunately doesn’t contain any of the original machinery and only half of the original buildings, was brought alive by an excellent guided tour which included a very interesting (and detailed) description of the...
“Many managers have leading roles both in a function and on a council or board...”
– The Economist’s briefing “Reshaping Cisco”.
July 2009
1 post
December 2008
3 posts
Creating great-looking musical scores
In my spare time, I enjoying singing in my two choirs Schola Cantorum of Oxford and Wadham College Chapel Choir. Because buying music for a whole choir is very expensive as even if each score is one or two pounds the cost gets multiplied by twenty or thirty, I often find myself singing free scores of out-of-copyright works, mainly from the Choral Public Domain Library. Although better than...
“Any company can generate simple descriptive statistics about aspects of its...”
– Competing on Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, January 2006 edition of the Harvard Business Review.
November 2008
3 posts
Raising Capital, Doing Deals: Building a Business...
Today, I attended a Building a Business lecture by Paul Fisher of Advent Ventures (who blogs at www.thecoffeeshopsofmayfair.com) on raising capital, which was the last Building a Business lecture before the Christmas break. As always, here are the lecturer’s slides:
VC is good for some firms and bad for others
success e.g. Skype
highly disruptive business.
binary proposition
...
Negotiating Skills: Building a Business Lecture 3
Tonight I attended the third lecture of the Building a Business Series, this time on negotiating skills given by Owen Darbishire, the Rhodes Trust University Lecturer in Management Studies at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. I’ve typed up my notes and posted them here, which you can use in addition to the lecturer’s slides:
Bidding
Escalation of commitment: people...
Taking the First Steps, Company Basics: Building a...
Today, I attended the first of the “Building a Business” lecture course at the Said Business School, which was given by Tom Hockaday, the managing director of Isis Innovation Ltd. His talk was titled “Taking the First Steps, Company Basic”. These are my notes (the lecturer’s slides are here):
A Company
Legal Entity
Defines things like liability,
Has a set of documents...
October 2008
2 posts
Internet Shopping and the Environment
There are many reasons why you should shop for your groceries online. It is true that it is convenient, and that you save time by not having to traipse around the store collecting items, and that there’s a certain thrill to be gained from shopping at Tesco at 4am for the first time in the comfort of your pyjamas, but all of these reasons have been covered many time before. Having glided...
September 2008
6 posts
Stephen Fry on the need for the BBC to stay in its...
James Rubin on China and Russia
Tonight I was lucky enough to go to a question and answer session with James Rubin, Democrat and foreign policy expert, ably hosted by the chief economist of HSBC Stephen King. The questions were very diverse, and of a high quality as one would expect from an audience of fund managers; they compared well with those at the Oxford Union, which tend to show the audience’s comparative (and...
Watch
Has it ever struck you the similarities between playing Championship Manager (circa late 1990’s) and asset management? Today, I noticed how alike the two activities are: first of all in the modus operandi: essentially, you take large amounts of data, both in the form of written news reports and analysts’ reports (or advice from coaches and scouts) as well as large arrays of numbers,...
One of my favourite programs to watch on the television is Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs pitch their companies to a panel of five “dragons” for investment. Although primarily a form of entertainment, I think there are some important lessons to be learnt about business from the show.
The first is the art of pitching, whether you are pitching your company, your product or yourself. The...
Notes from a Small Cubicle
Last week I started to do an internship at a city investment management firm, in the US equities team: now I’ve been doing it for a week, now seems like a good idea to jot down some thoughts. I don’t really want to get into investment philosophy – the team I work with seems to spend most of its time looking at charts and then trying to find a catalyst for change in the company, which...
August 2008
11 posts
The chosen ones →
Benjamin Markovits meets the GB handball team being trained from scratch.
“Why bother filing at all? Everything we know about the workplace suggests that...”
– “The Social Life of Paper”
Olympic Medals by Country
Here’s a map I created using Google Spreadsheet and data from the New York Times: I’m hoping to improve it to give include data about medals per dollar of GDP per capita, inspired by this article on the BBC website.
And here’s the BBC data mapped showing Medals per $US million million GDP:
The Power of Virtual Integration: An Interview... →
“That’s where the money is”
– Willie Sutton on being ask why he robbed banks.
“You won’t read a better book on teams anywhere else this year”
– FT reviewer Stefan Stern on the book “The Last Amateurs: To Hell and Back With The Cambridge Boat Race Crew” by Mard de Rond
How Do I Extract the First Five Words of an Excel... →
Should You Invest in the Long Tail? →
Interesting article on the long tail from the Harvard Business Review
