Trending On Medium Times change, and with them the bizarre habits of the Medium membership clammering for pennies worth of return. In the past month, I’ve noticed this odd new phenomenon, where random Medium members with a few thousand followers but who themselves follow just one account, suddenly appear out of nowhere and…

We all have our flaws. One of mine has always been my inability to make the right choices when it came to prioritising how I spend my time. Just like all children, I started out knowing nothing of the needs of others, only my own. The bad behaviour and rambunctiousness…

Personality Profiling — What Next? — Have you done one of those tests to find out your personality type yet? It’s becoming increasingly difficult to go through life without finding yourself in one of somebody else’s categories. Psychometric testing of new hires is everywhere. Myers-Briggs remains popular, but there seem to be dozens of others — some…

A Singapore Slingshot — Finally! After two entire years holed up in Hong Kong without setting foot on an airplane, at long last I made a short-term escape and popped across to Singapore for a week. At the time of booking, we were still in the grips of compulsory quarantine regulations and the prospect…

Massaging the collective conscience of the developed world How much do you care about the fate of the world? Your country? Your town? Your community? Your family? Yourself? In a recent corporate global meeting, some of my peers from the US and Europe shared details of work they’d been involved with, developing ideas about how cities could be…

For the past few years, I’ve been getting used to being an employee again after a couple of decades of working for companies I owned a stake in. My recent article explained some of the ways that didn’t work out the way I would have wanted it to… https://medium.com/illumination/how-all-three-companies-i-started-failed-for-the-same-reason-b8926671e82c When…

Fiction — It began — as far as I recall — one evening over a bowl of peaches; the tinned variety that comes sliced in sweet, clear syrup, reminding me as a boy of little lifeless goldfish. Dessert was called pudding when served at my mother’s table, and often in those days…

…and the one simple step that could have saved the day “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.” George W. Bush If you talk to entrepreneurs they will often talk to you about…

How tech organisations will meticulously steer us towards the end of the world — It was the morning of the 9th December 2016, and I was sitting in an arena among 15,000 of the keenest early-rising nerdy attendees of the Web Summit, in Lisbon, Portugal. Curiosity about this “Davos of the Internet” event led me to attend, and given that I’d recently set up…