Howard's Riffs
Putting your name on it
A small habit that twice came close to killing my company.
📝 Writing
This is where most of the writing lives. 650+ posts since 2016 - some about learning and creative work, some about whatever I couldn't let go of that week. A restaurant that changed fine dining, a Nintendo executive who saved the company, a Gmail interface for leaked documents...
Howard's Riffs
It nearly got through mine
I didn't love it. Couldn't have told you why, though. Not enough to stop.
AI
I built a video game about surviving my own workshop
The enemies are the room: the Skeptic, the Expert, the one on their phone. I built it to demo an AI tool, then everyone wanted to play it instead.
Creative Business
Home Games
A touring DJ plays almost every night away from home. Andy C says the hardest gigs of his career were at his own club.
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #33 - The Tour He Stopped Giving
A man bought a wreck in Spitalfields and spent twenty years taking it backwards - no electricity, no plumbing, no twentieth century. Why?
Culture & Insights
Avon & Stringer - hard enough, smart enough?
Too commercial for the artists, too weird for the suits
Learning Innovation
Teaching to Learn
The delivery is ten hours. The design took four people six months. Guess where the learning was.
Learning Innovation
Question Design
One subject added to every curriculum, from five-year-olds to chief executives. Mine would be questions.
Howard's Riffs
Tight But Polite
There are two people on a nightclub door and neither is on your side. Which is why the guy on the gate in Brooklyn threw me completely.
Learning Innovation
The Fortune Cookie Test
If your feedback would fit anyone, it's a fortune cookie. Six rules from a few weeks inside the research on feedback.
Creative Business
When everyone hates your best work
The people who made Walk This Way thought it was rubbish. Somebody had to be certain anyway - and outside music, that job has no name.
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #32 - The Hum They Took Out
She played every character on Argentina's Friday night comedy show. Then she left to make a record, and a very good producer took the strangest thing out of it.
Mindsets & Growth
Why Me?
When someone introduces me to a new contact, I ask them why they thought of me. The answers are rarely what I'd have guessed.
Learning Innovation
Cereal Is a Soup
A professor told me her students weren't checking whether their evidence held up. So we turned a librarian's checklist into a game, and gave it a research intern who can't tell gold from junk.
A.I
120 Questions With Correct Answers
Mexico's most prestigious university has cancelled around 3,000 entrance exams over suspected AI cheating. Everyone's arguing about the detection. I'd look at the exam.
Creative Business
Utah to Vegas, via Norway
How one of the world's biggest bands got their first international gig: a tourist, a CD, and a festival in Norway.
Creative Business
Thirty Years of Hating Television
David Chase spent almost thirty years in network television wanting to be somewhere else. Then, at 53, he made The Sopranos.
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #31 - Joker Poker
Five million copies. Nominated for Game of the Year. Built by refusing to look at anyone else.