Learning Innovation
The Inside Intro
How to get buy-in during any workshop or live session
📝 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...
Best of...
How to open a Primary School
A commodities trader wanted to open primary schools in forgotten coastal towns. He bought a football club instead. Here's what happened next.
Howard's Riffs
Playtesting
What I learned at the fringe bit of London Games Festival.
Culture & Insights
Three Music Revolutions
And why true innovations are surprisingly rare
Howard's Riffs
Pressure is a Privilege - but not because it's rare
Tom Hiddleston says pressure is breathing rare air. He's right - kinda.
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #24 - The Black Bean Sauce
When a Michelin-starred chef went back to school in a tent camp - and built something that's fed 130 million people
Creative Business
The Right Bakery
In France's most prestigious bread competition, the winners keep coming from somewhere unexpected.
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #23 - Dance Like No One's Watching (Because They Aren't)
A breakup, a car park, and what happens when you stop waiting to be good enough
Best of...
The Fork
The gap between AI-native and everyone else is widening. I'm not sure anyone knows how to close it.
Howard's Riffs
Interconnected Agency
Agency is a real word. It means something - or it used to. And now Silicon Valley has it.
Howard's Riffs
Saturday mornings
The loop that builds senior judgment is closing. The institutions can't move fast enough. So what happens in the gaps?
A.I
What A.I. quietly undoes
A.I. doesn't replace collaboration - it makes it optional. And optional things have a way of disappearing.
Creative Business
The Merchant's Stall
Merchant.dev's shop looks like a Studio Ghibli market stall. Nothing's stopping anyone from building something that feels like a place.
Howard's Riffs
Madri: A Beer from Nowhere
A "Spanish" beer brewed in Burton-on-Trent is now the UK's fourth most popular. How did they figure this out?
Groove Theory
Groove Theory #22 - A Narrow Corridor on La Rive Gauche
A keynote brief, two weeks on the clock, and a question: how much of yourself fits through someone else's frame?
Mindsets & Growth
Your Other Language Skills
Your language skills matter more than ever - but not the ones you think. Industries, sectors, scenes. The jargon, the rhythm, the sub-sub-sub of it all. Which ones do you speak?
Mindsets & Growth
What Do You Do?
How do you explain what you do in two sentences? Your career, your side project, the thing you still can't describe to your parents?
Best of...
Piano for the Office
In 1906, typing was marketed to women as "piano for the office." Safe. Respectable. Those same roles are now most exposed to AI automation.