Margaret Thatcher's strength was as a conviction politician, driven by a belief in the qualities of self-reliance, hard work and determination. It was these qualities, applied to herself, which propelled her to success, created her appeal and defined what it is we now call Thatcherism. Margaret Thatcher's weakness was a...

I was listening to the BBC's Today programme yesterday. The prime minister, David Cameron, was being interviewed and in a throw-away soundbite to demonstrate how radical his administration was he said, "we have broken up the state monopoly on the provision of public education." I must confess I was only...

This is a great article, written by Steve Denning in Forbes. It exposes fundamental flaws in the way many businesses have approached the business of strategy in recent years and it puts the focus back on the creation of value based around giving customers what they want. In...

I have recently listened to the last of Niall Ferguson's Reith Lectures. The lecture goes something like this: civil society is in decline, this is because of the growth of the State and the solution is to encourage the growth of private education.

The evidence does seem pretty...

I have had a quick look at the Facebook prospectus. The thing I found really interesting was not confirmation of revenue and its dependence on advertising, but a very first glimpse of how Facebook's costs are structured. I believe the key to working out a long-term, sustainable valuation for Facebook...

I have recently come across this excellent Ted Talk by Kevin Slavin. It looks at algorithms and the powerful, but also hidden and unsupervised way they shape our world. It is a trifle scary. Kevin focuses on areas such as financial trading, but makes the point that algorithms...

The single most important thing to realise about social media is that it is different. Almost all of the mistakes being made in social media occur because organisations do not fully appreciate this and simply look to drag their existing marketing and communications ideas, campaigns and ways of thinking into...

One of the problems of the recent rash of Occupations by the Occupy movement, quite apart from determining what space they should actually be occupying (as in the London, St Paul's Cathedral fiasco) is the difficulty in discerning what the Occupiers are protesting either in favour of, or...