Category Archives: Uncategorized

1. The immutable, Darwinian law of new technology.  Remember when Sony dominated consumer electronics, IBM dominated PCs and Nokia enjoyed a 70% market share?  History has shown that technology-based businesses with dominant market shares and apparently bullet-proof business models will eventually be replaced by younger, more innovative versions of themselves. 2. Yogi Berra’s law of popularity.  The [...]

Back in the Dark Ages – by which I mean the mid 1980s – a time before mobile phones, let alone Facebook, we somehow managed to enjoy a vibrant social life.  We relied on something far more potent than technology: we understood human behaviour.  In practical terms this meant that we could predict, with a reasonably level [...]

Alastair Dryburgh is one of the heroes of Loose for his willingness to challenge conventional thinking.  Here, for example, is his description of forecasting: “an activity that is at best useless and at worst actually counterproductive … forecasting nourishes the dangerous illusion that we know what is going to happen.”  His advice, which concurs with [...]

Much gnashing of teeth has greeted the news of the early closure of the Phantom of the Opera sequel, Love Never Dies, and not simply from Andrew Lloyd Webber.  It has been seen by many commentators, including David Lister in Saturday’s Independent, as symbolising a defeat for the professional critic. Despite some generally positive reviews [...]

An extract from my new book Loose … It was fascinating to observe the progress of Team Sky during last summer’s Tour de France. The expensively assembled team, under the leadership of Dave Brailsford, is following the template used by Brailsford to transform the performance of Britain’s track cycling team from also-rans to the best [...]