La Cage Auf Folles - part 2

A few weeks back I saw John Barrowman play the Albin in La Cage Aux Folles. I blogged about his excellent performance. Unusually, I found myself back in the Playhouse Theatre the other day to watch the show again. This time with Douglas Hodge playing the role of Albin. Douglas had created the role when the show first opened and had been brought back for a final run before transferring to Broadway. I am so glad I went. Hodge was brilliant. Really brilliant. He played it very differently to Barrowman. Much more camp with a terrific attention to the fine detail of the mannerisms of the complex Albin character. This created a fabulous atmosphere in the theatre and the evening is one I shall remember for a long time.

The show has now closed in London, transferring to Broadway where I believe Douglas Hodge will be playing alongside Kelsey Grammer as Georges.

Mexico

We're just back from a splendid two weeks in Mexico, staying at the Riu Palace Las Americas. This was my first trip to Cancun, and I'm not going to write at length about the things we did. However, I can thoroughly recommend the hotel. It was friendly, clean, with excellent food and service. The hotel has its own beach, which is cleaned every day and of course the turquoise waters are beautifully clear and clean.

We flew with Thomson and the fights were all on time and pain free - and I even enjoyed the safety announcements which were done by children. If the airline could improve one thing, it would be to get the service out of the way quicker on the return leg so that passengers had a chance of some proper sleep.

The value of social media

In harsh economic times, organisations exercise tighter control. Control over costs is the obvious example. However, the means by which tighter control is exercised can often(but not always) be more centralisation, and consequentially less freedom. This can in turn impact the amount of freedom people are given to engage in social media activity, or can create an environment where they are afraid to. This scenario means it is even more compelling that we are able to articulate the value that an organisation can derive from social media. Otherwise we’ll be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Accepting that there is value in social media is one thing, but unless we can articulate and quantify that vlaue, the days are numbered.

Dissolving boundaries.

I’ve written about blending before, so here’s a quick reminder.

o business & personality

o inside & outside

o home & work

o collaboration & fun

They’re all going to be blurred in future. That’ll impact technology, our work lives, our home lives, and attitudes to work in general.

Work really is no longer a place, it's just one of the things we do during our daily lives. And it's mixed in with all the other things.

Organisations think big.

Organisations think big. They think in terms of enterprise solutions, signing enterprise agreements with big vendors. Organisations also like to claim agility. Are these two things compatible? As we move to smaller devices, like the iPhone, with consequentially smaller apps, will this have a knock-on effect in the way CIOs view their technology platforms and procurement choices? Not for a long time I predict. Which is unfortunate as lots of small steps often brings benefits much faster than waiting for one big step.

Why would you do that?

I just bought a book off Amazon.co.uk. It cost 1p. I paid £2.75 for postage. The book arrived this morning and the postage label showed the sender had paid £2.25 to send it to me. Plus the cost of the jiffy bag, and the ink to print the label. And the time to take it to the Post office.

Why bother?

Pace of change 2

Change is constant. We all know that. But in a fast moving world, change takes much longer than we expect. I remember in the mid-1990s talking at conferences about how, with intranets, the paperless office was almost with us. Yet today, for many organisations that is still not reality. When social media started to gain traction three or four years ago, we all said it was going to have a fundamental impact on business. But when? In my experience, what we think will happen quickly, takes much longer.

Not long ago adoption of technology used to lag behind the technology – we’d have a new system, but persuading people to use it was often the hard part. However, now we often find the technology we want is struggling to keep up with the way we use it. Which is great because it gives us the opportunity to drive technology developments from real, not imaginary, demand.