The recent excitement concerning Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of 80 million Facebook users’ data reminded me to delete my Facebook account a few weeks back. It’s not the first time I’ve closed my account – the last time was back in 2010 when Facebook were found to be unhelpful and under-resourced for assisting police track down… Read More
Running an effective off-site – Epilogue
At Bulletproof, we’ve found that running offsites has been tremendously beneficial for the c-level team and for Bulletproof in general. A noted in my first post – Why we did it – we researched and worked out how we would run our offsite and what we’d aim to get from it. We came up with… Read More
Running an effective offsite – Part 4: Set the goals
In my previous post in this series about our experiences running an offsite, I talked about how we reviewed the company vision and values. In this article, I talk about the next step you might want to think about, which is breaking the vision down into goals. Our experience is that goals should be shared… Read More
Running an effective offsite – Part 3: Review the values
This is the 4th post in a series about running a company offsite. In my first post, I talked about why you might want to run an offsite. In the next post, I discussed setting the ground rules, while in the last post I talked about reviewing and testing the company Vision. When trying to… Read More
Running an effective offsite – Part 2: Review the Vision
In the last post, I talked about the important ground rules that could be considered when setting up an offsite, having previously discussed the reasons for holding an offsite, and some of the basic logistics. In this post, I discuss the process that we followed for setting an agenda — having set the scene and the… Read More
Running an effective offsite – Part 1: Setting the Ground Rules
In my previous post, I discussed the reasons for running an offsite. In this post, I continue the discussion by looking at the setting of ground rules. Ground rules are important, because they make it easy to answer the questions “Should we be discussing this here?”, and “What’s best way to make sure everyone is… Read More
Running an effective offsite – Prologue: Why we did it
Recently, we ran an offsite for our C-level team at Bulletproof. In this series of posts, I expand on why we decided to do it and share the wisdom we learned while preparing for, researching, and running it. Finally, ending with what we hope to get out of running offsites. Why we held an offsite.… Read More
CEO Sleepout 2012: Thoughts
Last night I slept outside along with 250-odd other CEOs in the NSW chapter of the CEO Sleepout. With the help of my amazing group of friends and relatives, I raised $5,220 for this cause that raised in total $4.75m to combat homelessness. To put that in perspective, last year’s sleep out raised $2.5m; the… Read More
Has the Sun set on Apple?
Late in 1984, as a spotty year 10 student, I found myself in a city computer store fooling around with a computer unlike any other. I’d already had a few years cutting my teeth on Sinclair’s ZX81, and my local high school’s solitary green-screen Apple IIe. But in front of me was the combination of… Read More
Driving Cloud up the Adoption Curve
I attended VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas last week. As a first-timer, the spectacle of Vegas and the size of the event seemed well matched, even though a few thousand folks from the east coast didn’t make it. “Only” 19,000 attended Paul Maritz’ keynote from a previously-suggested 25k. My take on the keynote was that VMware… Read More