Business Thinking

How Lee Walker overcame Dell's biggest growth plateau in 1986. A story about capital, imagination, and creative deal-making.

Two personal stories of capital expertise 'in the small' — or why financing creativity can be just as important to smaller businesses, as it is in larger, more sophisticated ones.

What, exactly, is the skill of capital? What does it consist of? How do you recognise it? We walk through three stories, and then talk about the shape of the skill in practice.

A technical overview of how I'm applying the methods and ideas of the Becoming Data Driven in Business series.

We trace Michael Dell's skill at the art of capital in business, and use it to examine how skill at capital allows you to make moves that aren't available to a novice business operator.

Every analytics project consists of two parts. The technical part, and then the 'get the organisation on board' part. We talk about why the latter is the real challenge.

One of the great paradoxes of business is that management is prediction, but entrepreneurship ... isn't. What a theory of expertise in entrepreneurship tells us about creating new things in business.

In a business context, what should you think when presented with a time series? Or: a really dumb question that nobody seems to talk about.

The process behaviour chart is the easiest way to differentiate between routine and exceptional variation. This is everything you need to know to use it well.

Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.