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

  • Managers are waste: Five organisations saying goodbye to the boss

    “Until there is a monumental shift in the leadership dynamic from the old fashioned command and control to a collaborative, status free, matrix way of working, then the debate about the need for an office (in the traditional sense) will be a long one.”  – Tracey Johnson commenting on Why The Death Of The Office… Read more

  • Robot Revolution: Our disappearing jobs and the future of work

    “Imagine a pair of horses in the early 1900s talking about technology. One worries that all these new mechanical muscles will make horses unnecessary. The other reminds him that everything so far has made their lives easier. Remember all that farm work? Remember running coast-to-coast delivering mail? Remember riding into battle? All terrible. These city… Read more

  • Why The Death Of The Office Can’t Come Too Soon

    “We literally followed people around all day and timed every event [that happened in the office], to the second. That meant telephone calls, working on documents, typing e-mails, or interacting with someone. What we found is that the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted was about three minutes.” – Gloria… Read more

  • Throwback: Our Social Journey (So Far….)

    Your life story is being told by the digital content you produce  One of the downsides of our digital lifestyle is that we simply can’t retain the information that passes through it. I couldn’t tell you what I tweeted last week, much less a year ago. Digital storage is changing our memories. We don’t need to… Read more

  • Our Twitter only recruitment: An update

    It’s two months since we announced our Twitter only recruitment so I thought it was time for an update. We’ve been pretty much overwhelmed by the number of people who registered an interest in the Lab. We had over 14,000 views of the material and are still getting enquiries. The follow up conversations took a lot… Read more

  • What Uber, Comms Hero and HouseParty tell us about the future of the conference…

    (A version of this post originally appeared on 24Dash – go visit them as they’re great!) 2pm 11th June: London grinds to a halt. Cab drivers have downed tools for an hour. Uber, a smartphone app that offers an easy and cheap taxi booking service, has rolled into the UK. Our taxi drivers, required to… Read more