Spent the weekend with my lovely friends for whom I was Best Man. We went to place with a couple of bowling alleys and some interactive dartboards. It’s been some years since I rolled a bowling ball, and I can’t help going full Big Lebowski with it. Typically my first ball down the alley flukes a strike, and then I’ll spend the rest of the time failing to replicate that. It’s the kind of thing I’d probably be much better at if I went every week, like everything else.
I lectured again, this time for the start-up accelerator the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, at which I’ve also been in a previous cohort. I wrote the 90-min session a year ago: it’s a bit of a slog but it’s the shortest amount of time I can possibly take to give a non-brand person the insight and skills to be able to develop one themselves. I also found I needed to do some subtle rewrites: since I constructed the thing I’ve found my thinking has moved on a little in some areas. I now find the balance of content tipping away from customer insights and into areas such as sector truths and working culture. Not because customers are important, but because start-ups are already thinking about them. What they often miss, as many businesses do, are the shared objectives and enemies of their sector peer-group, that they needn’t reinvent. As a small business it’s far more efficient, with only a few exceptional cases, to let market leaders do all the work to educate customers about the sector. Anyway. Will likely do another in the summer, by which point I’ll likely disagree with myself again.
Quite a lot of snow fell, over several days. It’s been unusually cold for the time of year.
Partially because of the weather, it’s been a quiet, head-down kind of week.
