Purpose

At the end of the 1990s, a colleague of mine was sacked because he complemented a fellow female worker on how lovely her hair looked. I thought it was political correctness gone mad, but it’s even worse today. You feel you’re walking on egg shells all the time. For example, I got sacked for saying…

Appearing in a Parliamentary session the other day, Woody Malouf, Revolut’s head of financial crime, said Meta platforms were “being used as a hotbed for scams” and estimated that 3 out of 5 scams are being generated by Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp I’ve no idea about your experience but my experience is that anything I…

I’ve asked myself this question often recently: could the banking system be run outside the banking system? I guess the start point of this discussion is: what is the system? Just like to be or not to be, that is the question. What is the system? It’s a debate I’ve been having for years –…

I picked up a great quote the other day: “Money isn’t about value … it’s about values”. It resonates with my own tagline for the last book (Digital for Good) which is: “Stand for something or you will fall”. The point of the latter is: What is the purpose of your life and work? The…

I find the world fascinating. Humans are amazing. We just launched the James Webb Telescope to see world’s formed billions of years ago and the Elizabeth Line. Both are engineering projects of immense challenge, and immense cost, as covered by many documentaries. Then I read that Chinese social media celebrates the assassination of Shinzo Abe,…

Back in the day, a number of books were key to my management thinking. Books by Peter Drucker, James Champy and Michael Hammer, Ricardo Semler, Michael Treacy, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, and more. All of these books were about changing businesses to be customer focused, and one of the…

I just had a nice interview with EFMA (now Qorus) about the new book Digital for Good (available here), and thought I would share the interview here. Hope you like it. Qorus- It is not always easy to distinguish genuine leaders from clever communicators. How did you select the different people you gave the floor…

I launched the new book Digital for Good in London the other day, and was joined by many friends in my network. The main highlight of the event was a panel discussion on where we are going with four panellists: Gail Bradbrook, Co-founder, Extinction Rebellion Gihan A.M. Hyde, Founder & CEO, CommUnique Tram Anh Nguyen,…

For a few months now, I’ve given Gail Bradbrook, Co-Founder of Extinction Rebellion, a voice on this blog. The idea was to get understanding through talking. There have been many negative reactions, particularly this challenge from an angry banker. Since then, he has sent me several more negative emails, which I haven’t shared, but decided the…

I was reflecting on the fact that I’ve been talking about digital banking for a decade and a half. That’s a long time. I’d claim to have fathered the phrase Banking-as-a-Service back in the 2000’s, and yet only a third of banks understand the concept of BaaS today. "Only a third of banks understand the concept"…