Releases
I grew up with records being released. I remember saving up and going down to Musica on Main Road in Plumstead to buy my first single, a 7-inch 45 of Blondie's Call Me. Later came my first album, Michael Jackson's Off the Wall.
This was before CDs. You bought the record, and taping it onto a cassette was still a novelty. Eight-tracks had only faded out a few years before, and we still had a player at home.
When a record came out, the artist had decided it was ready and let it go. A release on this site is the same: something I've made and put out into the world.
I published my first website in the mid-1990s, when the web was still new. Before that it was listservs and Gopher, and the first graphical web browser, Mosaic, was only a year or two old and had just taken over from Lynx, a text-based browser. In 1996 I started writing releases on Stones, alongside some of the first things I built: a unit trust guide, UTSA, and a restaurant guide, dine.co.za.
There are more than 260 releases here now. They've covered strategy, leadership, teams, the odd Ironman, and whatever else has caught my attention.
If you'd like the next one by email, leave your address below.
Latest releases
- The Worst Design Won
- Comfort is not safety
- Herbie
- A Stream of Consciousness You Can Steer
- Nodding Along
- The Slow Loss of Long-Form Reading
- Snapshot - An Alignment Diagnostic
- How Is This Brand Trying To Manipulate Me?
- Strategic Leadership under pressure: My analysis of the Trump-Ramaphosa Oval Office meet
- Surface Tension - Conclusion: Embrace the Unconscious
Favourite releases
- The 3am Test
Can anyone in your business describe your strategy if you wake them at 3am? - TEDx - When you laugh something happens
- Strategy is about getting into a more powerful position
Where my definition of strategy comes from, starting in Belgrade in 1992. - Rival
A short film that we wrote and produced for the BANFF film festival - As a businessman, Archimedes' lever would be alignment
On alignment, and getting everyone moving in the same direction. - Western Cape Covid Scenarios
1,000 years of business experience working together to think about the future of business in the Western Cape, set at the start of the Covid Pandemic. - Pick one priority
Why there is only ever one priority at a time. - Surface Tension
An eight-part series on strategy, starting here. - The paradox of strategy
Good strategy shows both the simple and the complex. - Tankwa fly away
A short flight over the mountains, a different perspective on the world - The case for optimism
Why I choose optimism, even when I can't prove I'm right.
All other releases
- Surface Tension - Strategy Eight: Make Leadership Explicit - The DAC Model as a Practical Diagnostic
- Surface Tension - Strategy Seven: The Hot Seat - Creating Crucibles for Candour and Growth
- Surface Tension - Strategy Six: Leading by Being Rather Than Leading by Doing
- Surface Tension - Strategy Five: Beyond Absolute Answers: The Power of Polarity Thinking
- Surface Tension - Strategy Four: Building Intelligence Through Pause
- Surface Tension - Strategy Three: Beyond Team Building
- Surface Tension - Strategy Two: Creating Containers for Anxiety
- Surface Tension - Strategy One: Developing X-ray vision
- Surface Tension - Introduction to the series
- Beneath the surface: What You Can’t See Is Running the Show
- Two questions that replace your entire strategy deck
- Why AI Needs Your Imagination
- The Power of Myth: How GNU and the Bomb Squad Reshaped Reality
- Can you pass the 3am test like the Springboks do?
- Out beyond the place of good and bad strategy, there is a field, I’ll meet you there
- No Bedtime Stories
- Simplify your strategy so that it passes the 3am test
- Strategy Overuse
- Scenario Planning AI (SPAI)
- Struths
- Coaching in a system
- Friends shaking hands
- Navigating the grey: My journey through ethics and complexity in Strategy Coaching
- Influence
- Leading Strategy
- What's needed to lead strategy?
- The future of creativity
- Recruit better than the Israeli army
- Strategy Coaching
- The 3am Test
- Strategy is about getting into a more powerful position
- Pick one priority. Everything else is a priority-to-be or just not as important.
- Priorities and goals
- As a businessman - Archimedes lever would be alignment
- Western Cape Covid Scenarios
- Rival Movie
- What relationship status do you have with your company?
- Taking the sting out of feedback
- Engaging (and the truth about hugs)
- Doubting our plans
- TedX When you laugh something happens (Westerford)
- Values (2)
- Values
- Two ways forward
- Extreme emotions
- My manifesto on art and life
- Mandela: I want revenge but I want something more
- Leadership beyond Nelson Mandela
- When listening to customers doesn't work
- Taking the noise out of situations
- The limitation of experts
- Can we assume Blackberry will still be around?
- All time is not created equal
- Looking for answers is a poor substitute for good questions
- Are famous people good people?
- Receiving feedback
- Reversing the logic
- It underpins everything
- Legacy
- Jumping in
- Follow the energy
- The best way to end a meeting
- Feedback
- Learning organisations
- The big blue bubble
- This is an interactive presentation
- The shortest meeting
- Insiders and outsiders
- Starting again
- The liberating effect of constraints
- Qualifications
- Being nice and being a mensch
- There is always baggage
- Closed questions
- I don't do politics
- What I want to be when I grow up
- How many moves ahead?
- Dance to your own tune
- The upside of rejected
- Valuing yourself
- Contribution
- Looking back to learn
- Heuristics
- I only need 1%
- Give me sticks and stones any day
- Bad Powerpoints
- Communication #2
- Communication #1
- Strategy and yoga
- The end of the classroom (as we know it)
- Slowly and suddenly
- Balloons
- The essence of a strategy
- Innovative disagreement
- Great questions
- Newspaper's opaque purpose
- Walking out the door
- How not to have a meeting
- It's always more complex
- Be prepared to be wrong
- A test of your rational thinking
- Executive coaching
- Two types of learning
- A managers roots
- Flow
- The purpose of fear
- Finding Sugarman - Finding Ourselves
- The strategic thinking of Lance Armstrong and Ivan Fernandez Anaya
- Unlimited power to ask questions
- Intention and impact
- Critics don't count
- Creation and destruction
- Jack Welch was wrong
- Luck and skill
- Making something outa nothing
- Overcoming bias
- Personal strategy
- Looking and seeing are not the same thing
- Being scared
- PS and PPS on failure
- Learning to fail
- Empty communication
- The paradox of strategy
- Globalisation 3.0
- Work and play
- A strategic way to find a new job
- On trust and strategy
- Strategy without action
- Ideal vs. good enough
- Relationships count
- However good the strategy
- “Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action comes, stop thinking and go in.” ― Napoleon Bonaparte
- Avoiding the official future
- Facebook's real problem
- Turn Your Career into a Work of Art
- Google Course Asks Employees to Take a Deep Breath
- Dilemma's of decision making
- 6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers
- 5 Ways Corporate Execs Can Thrive at a Start-up
- How to not get a job
- Steve Jobs: A living eulogy
- 3m
- The new retirement
- Bad strategy
- Most strategic partnerships are purchase orders
- The psychology of being wrong
- What Google can learn from Microsoft about strategy
- Customer driven CSR
- Lewis Pugh - Activist Polar Bear
- Unusual strengths
- Strategies that change the world: Grameen Bank
- Has Google outgrown 'do no evil'?
- Tankwa Fly In
- Methods of persuasion
- Ueli Gegenschatz, lots of practice and a matching mental attitude
- The limitation of goals
- The best company to work for
- Bob Skinstad's strategy for South Africa
- Are you in the zone?
- The Barack Obama strategy
- Gary Kirsten on his strategy to get India to #1
- Swimming with the sharks
- What Apple and Vida e Caffè have in common
- Facebook vs MySpace - The writing's on the wall
- The worlds #1 blogger
- Leonard Chuene’s real mistake
- How we missed Madiba
- Broccoli project scoops two prizes
- Trevor Manuel: "I could close my eyes now..."
- Vitality and Voyager-like rewards for the poor
- Intellectual Vandalism
- Zuma’s Wednesday Challenge
- The case for optimism
- SA: Best place for kids to grow up
- Coaching South Africa
- Zille’s decision contrary to research
- Dead wrong about Zuma
- Beaten by the heat
- Showers and your brand
- On being a recovering racist
- Listen to your body
- "Don't Panic"
- James Peterson - An Amazing Man
- Conscious Incompetence
- Loving Life
- My fascination with the Mont Fleur Scenarios
- 9 weeks to go
- Kenny Lah and Me
- Confidence Builder
- Bush Running
- Nice heart, shame about the legs.
- Phew! That was hard...
- Swimming between Meetings
- 30 Years of the Ironman Triathlon World Championship
- I'm back
- Totally Challenged
- Totalsports Challenge 2009
- R&R Run and then Rest
- Pulled muscle
- Taper...
- Ironman 2009
- It's about us leaders
- Perceptions
- Fatherhood
- Ironman South Africa 2008 - Learning to do things a different way
- race 4 literacy
- The curse of knowledge
- Story of Stuff
- Do you exist?
- Learning to fly
- Defined by my work
- Problems and Creations
- Time and again...
- Why do we need coaching?
- Old Fisherman's Trail Run
- Learning from Africa
- Playing to your strengths
- Time Warp
- Technology Trust
- Tortoise Productivity
- Digital Labels
- Breaking barriers
- Stifling creativity on the Web
- Comdex 97 : A new venue for an ongoing battle
- The beginning of the end for Microsoft?
- The 2000 fear mongers
- Amazing Amazon - where to from here?
- Addicted to the net?
- David vs. McGoliath (A modern day web battle)
- After action satisfaction - real people relax with the Internet
- The Internet - Where to from here?
- Share community alive and kicking
- Hits (and misses)
- Who owns 2004?
- Organic growth and the internet?
- Travelling with the Internet
- Where the web fits
- FAQs as an alternative to search engines
- Who gets copies of your eMail?
- What sells on the internet?
- Moving the queue from the ATM to the web server
- The human approach to finding information on the internet
- Banking on the internet
- Internet advertising - on and off the web
- The size of things to come
- Internet Communities - governments of the future
- The web-why-bother factor