Ross Farrelly

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 ...

I've just finished reading a very good book which I am moved to share with you. It's The Uses of Pessimism by my favourite conservative modern day philosopher, Roger Scruton. Scruton argues that a number of fallacies lie at the heart of much of the misguided thinking we see in politics, art and the humanities today. He argues that, when presented with the grand plans of the theorists and the unbridled enthusiasm of the believers in human progress, a small dose of pessimism and a sprinkling of irony would go a long way towards bringing some reason into the picture. He lists fallacies such as: The born free fallacy: the false belief that people are born free and that by removing all societal constraints such as law, custom and traditions, people will be able to live happily, freely and peacefully – free from oppression. He points out that people are not born free – societies have earned (relative) freedom by building institutions, morals, customs and traditions which restrain ...

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2008 US $27.99, 320 pp ISBN 978 0 31601 792 3 First published in Policy Magazine , June 2009. High intelligence and extraordinary achievement are endlessly fascinating subjects. We’d all like to know the secret behind stratospherically successful individuals so we can emulate their accomplishments. Outliers sets out to explain the secret of success—but it is far from successful in doing so. To solve the puzzle of high achievement, Gladwell takes a number of examples of exceptional people and seeks to explain why these people reached great heights in their chosen professions. But rather than examining the personality types of these exceptional individuals, he looks at the environment in which they grew up. Gladwell’s thesis is that demographic, social, and even ancestral factors have greater explaining power than individual personality traits when trying to account for success. Gladwell’s book is wri...

first published in Policy Magazine , Autumn 2008 A review of Super Crunchers by Ian Ayres On a recent visit to my local medical centre I came face to face with the fact that Dr Google now seems to know more than my family GP. I was ushered into the consultation room where I explained my symptoms to a slightly ruffled and obviously overworked doctor. He listened attentively, nodded thoughtfully and then asked for a moment while he entered a few keywords into Google. “Right then,” he continued brightly, “what you have is …” and proceed to diagnose my ailment and prescribe the necessary to clear it up. I was taken aback. What was he doing looking it up on Google? I expected that he’d have enough experience to know what my problem was. And what if the internet was down? Would he just guess? I was reminded of this incident and my reaction to it when reading Super Crunchers . Ian Ayers’ latest book addresses this very question – what is the right use of data and how can conclusions derived ...

A review of Zen Tails by Peter Whitfield, illustrated by Nancy Bevington. Published in Education Today , October 2004   Zen Tails is a unique series of children’s books aimed at ages 5 - 8. It sets out to convey to young readers some of the profound wisdom contained in the vast store of traditional stories of the East. The Zen Tails are enacted by nine animal characters who are grouped into three group: the teachers, the students and the fools. The teachers (a St. Bernard, a wombat and a turtle representing action, love and knowledge) are the enlightened ones. The students (a beagle, a hippo and a beaver representing courage, compassion and studiousness) are striving to emulate them. The fools (a cat, a monkey and a bear representing laziness, agitation and anger) are living in selfish ignorance. In case you don’t get all this from reading the books, it’s spelt out for you on a three bookmarks which comes with the series. Nancy Bevington’s illustration...