Paul Taylor

Latest Writing

  • Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure

    Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure

    Catastrophic predictions that spell dark days for humanity are nothing new. The Times predicted in 1894 that in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure. It was the crisis of all crises. There was, to be fair, some evidence for this. As urban populations rapidly increased… Read more

  • The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual

    The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual

    The interior secrets of black holes are guarded by a one-way light-trapping boundary called the event horizon. This horizon is the point, according to NASA, that the gravitational influence of the black hole becomes so intense that not even light is fast enough to escape it. A very different horizon exists in many organisations, except… Read more

  • Best Practice, Benchmarking and the Race to Mediocrity

    We must be different. We must be lopsided. No more herdlike regression toward the mean – we must find the things at which we’re great, and build on those – Tim Kastelle A few years ago my organisation adopted a new way of working. We implemented it , with the help of consultants, as it had achieved glowing… Read more

  • The End of Trust (and how organisations can rebuild it)

    We’ve seen an alarming evaporation of trust across all institutions, reaching the lows of the recession in 2009. Trust in government, business, media and non-profits is below 50% in two-thirds of countries, including the U.S, U.K, Germany and Japan. There has been a startling decrease in trust.  Richard Edelman The annual Edelman Trust Barometer is always fascinating reading… Read more

  • Six Ways To Kill Email

    Every week more and more organisations are waking up to the tyranny of email, and the part it is playing in the impending death of the office. We spend hours each week , up to four years of our lives, shifting low value (or no value) information from one place in our organisation to another.… Read more

  • How To Get Better At Failing

    “Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before.” Neil Gaiman Just before Christmas – in my final catch up of the year with my manager  – a pretty significant thing happened. I was told that Bromford Lab seriously needs to up its failure rate in 2015. Welcome to the parallel… Read more

  • We need more people solving problems – not professionals.

    Everyone has a story to tell, everyone has strengths beneath the conceptions that you have of them. But if you’re curious enough, you may just find that the answers you’ve always been looking for are there, often right beside you. – William Lilley Everywhere you look at the beginning of 2015 you will see a crisis.… Read more

  • 2015: The year we put the social back into housing 

    You can have super star status online without any official status offline; you can be a powerful chief executive offline with very little impact online – Victoria Betton  Just over two years ago I pronounced rather grandly that 2012 was the year we went social. The year the UK housing sector embraced new technologies embarking… Read more