Ross Farrelly

If, like many while collar workers in today’s modern economy, you are “time poor” and constantly swamped by the ever growing torrent of information coming at you every day, despair not. Help is at hand. But is comes in a somewhat unlikely guise. It’s not yet more sophisticated news aggregation text-mining algorithm, nor is it the next-gen web 3.0 nanoblogging, retwetting, facebook posting multifunction one-stop web-accumulation app for your smart phone. No. It is those leather bound volumes gathering dust on your bookshelf and that set of penguin classics you bought in a fit of self-improvement last year and have never read. Let me explain. The idea of being “time poor” really comes down to a balancing our desires. If we want to do more than we have time for, we say we are time poor. There are two possible solutions – either want to do less, or find a way to do more. Focusing on the latter solution, for many professionals, a closely related problem is that of deciding what information ...

Main Thesis – Companies need to invest in disruptive technologies, technologies which are typically low spec, more expensive and not required by their current customers in order to stay competitive in the long term. If they don’t, companies which do develop these new technologies will soon develop them into a main stream product which will displace the previous industry standard and the company will not thrive. There is a difference between sustaining innovations, which improve existing ways of doing things, and disruptive technologies, which do things in quite different ways or way a significantly lower cost. Christensen’s findings include: Companies need to invest in disruptive technologies early on.   They usually need to do so by starting a new company or spin off which is solely dedicated to developing the disruptive technology, commercializing it and finding or creating the right market to sell it into. They need to do this because trying to dedicate sufficie...

I was in the middle of reading Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel prize winning economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman which I started reading this book Brzezinski’s Strategic Vision .   One of the findings of Thinking Fast and Slow is that experts have a very, very low success rate when it comes to predicting the future in areas such as politics and economics so I approached Brzezinski’s pronouncements with a skeptical eye.  Nevertheless, in the absence of anything better, it is interesting to see what a foreign policy export like Brzezinski has to say about the future of Europe, America and China. In Part 2 - The Receding West, Brzezinski reminds us that Europe’s woes, both demographic and economic, are well known. Europe lacks the coherence to play a major role on the world stage. Due to its enormous national debt and its involvement in two expensive wars, America also has challenges due to such as: ·          The division ...