Another packed week, brimming with meetings.

This was a week in which I:

• Joined various meetings about our sister company’s office refurbishment project, ahead of the start of the audio-visual installation work in our shared spaces. The teams are working around each other and are on a deadline to get everything up and running before Christmas. We reviewed a couple of last-minute minor changes and snags with our audio-visual design vendor and agreed how we would manage them.
• Discussed ideas for the metrics that we should report in the quarterly management packs for our components once the shared meeting spaces are up and running.
• Had a great meeting where our project manager and I got around a whiteboard to map out one of our key security initiatives. There’s something about the process of starting with an empty canvas and filling it with pictures and words that feel like a shared understanding among the people that created it.
• Assisted with the work to decide on a long-term location in a city where we have just opened an office, outlining the time it would take from making a decision to fitting out and equipping each of the shortlisted spaces.
• Met with a colleague from Internal Audit as part of their kick-off work for an audit taking place over the next few months.
• Took part in our development team’s review of the items on their backlog.
• Stepped in for my boss at one of our legal entity governance committees.
• Met with our sister company for a financial review of the service agreement between our two organisations, and to agree the shape of the budget for 2026.
• Had the quarterly review of the performance of these same services.
• Learned that from the start of next year, feminine hygiene products will be available for free in the ladies’ toilets in our office. I’ve been asking about this for years, as it has always baffled me why this wasn’t the case.
• Caught up with colleagues to discuss a project that they conceived but that is now being run by another team.
• Met one-to-one with our two latest new joiners to the team, learning a bit more about their backgrounds and lives outside of work.
• Put together a slide on key achievements of the team this year for my boss to keep handy in an end-of-year review meeting.
• Met with the Technology Diversity, Equity and Inclusion forum.
• Dialled into the end-of-year celebration for our broader Technology department, hosted in South Africa. There is always so much singing and dancing at these events. It looked impressive on the other end of a Teams meeting, so it must have been amazing to see and hear it live.
• Enjoyed the Microsoft 365 Change Community Round Up meeting, organised by Empowering.Cloud. At the session, Tom Arbuthnot, Darrell Webster and Daniel Glenn go through significant updates to the Microsoft 365 platform. Generally, the Empowering.Cloud events are excellent and are well worth signing up for if you work in this space.
• Wished good luck to a colleague and friend who will be out of the office for a few weeks to recover from surgery. She’s already missed, and we’re looking forward to having her back with us.
• Ran our fortnightly management team meeting in her absence.
• Took a colleague through the basics of using the YNAB app and following their process. My wife and I have been using it for nearly 15 years. Although the annual cost of about £80 feels like a lot, I’ve saved that money many times over through knowing exactly where I am financially at all times.
• Reported a bug to the team behind the Ulysses text editor. Selecting text caused the window to rapidly scroll up or down, with no fine-grained control. The issue was confirmed and fixed with an app update later in the week. An impressive turnaround.
• Helped our youngest son with preparation for a cycle touring holiday that he and his friends want to do next year. He’s not a cyclist, so the first step was buying a helmet, and the second step was finding a bike. The cycling club WhatsApp group came to our rescue, with two people wanting to sell their retired steeds for very good prices. After inspecting and picking one up, we spent a bunch of time over the weekend buying and fitting pedals and shoe cleats, as well as de-gunking previously tubeless tyres and installing a set of inner tubes.
• Went out for dinner in Berkhamsted with some lovely friends who we hadn’t seen in a long time. It was great to catch up.
• Had two Album Club nights, one online and the other in person. Usually I take a photo at the latter and post it to my blog, but I couldn’t face doing it with that album cover. Albertine Sarges’ Girl Missing was fantastic.
• Updated the About page on this website for the first time in a few years. I also added both a Now page and a statement about my use of AI.
• Opted to skip the Saturday morning ride with the cycling club and jumped on the indoor trainer instead. The weather has been pretty bad over the past few weeks and I’m not one for heading out when it’s raining. On Sunday I went for a run with my wife which ended with a coffee and pastry; these are the best kind of runs.
• Had my popcorn out to watch the F1 Qatar Grand Prix. Next weekend’s finale has all the ingredients of a very memorable afternoon.

Media

Articles

• Jamil Zaki suggests that Every Team Needs a Super-Facilitator in the Harvard Business Review.
• Will Larson says that “Good engineering management” is a fad. (via Simon Willison). He talks about management paradigms of the past 25 years, why things changed, and the core skills that persist across time. I need to come back and explore his site as it looks like there is gold there.
• I really like the work that HOPE not hate are doing to investigate Reform UK and hold them to account. Their fortnightly Reform Watch newsletter is excellent, with links to posts such as a profile of Kevin Byrne, Reform’s small business champion.
• The Press Gazette has a report about how ChatGPT gave an answer with paywalled content and then said it couldn’t have done it. I love this paragraph that neatly says why LLMs are bad at telling you how they work and what they’ve done:

Guardian head of editorial innovation and AI Chris Moran said: “Given the probabilistic nature of LLMs, asking them to explain themselves simply isn’t a thing. Anything from the moment you asked it to explain itself is simply not the truth – it’s a kind of ersatz apology or explanation constructed one token at a time in reaction to the previous context.”

• In stark contrast, I winced when I heard Michael Morton from MoffettNathanson say this on his Stratechery interview with Ben Thompson:

Michael Morton: So in conversational commerce, why it’s better and why it’s so fun to research this evolving subject is go ask the models. So I sat down, I asked ChatGPT, I asked Gemini, I asked all the different models, “Hey, when I ask you what’s the best running shoe, what do you do?”, and they’ll tell you, “We go read all the expert websites”. That’s what Mike did, they go look at the product build materials, they go read reviews like on Amazon and Zappos, that’s a whole other fight that’s going on. And so Google is looking at this more formulaic. Who’s bidding? What’s the conversion rate? Where’s the information? The models look at all the knowledge behind that.

• He reiterates this again later in the interview. Thompson does push back, albeit gently:

Michael Morton: Again, why I like searching this subject so much, and thinking about it is, ask the models. So, we ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and all the different models, “For an e-commerce query, what do you weight in your decision-making process?”, and from most important to least important. And the top three, number one is price, number two is trustworthiness, and number three is speed. Price, speed, trustworthiness, you start to see where this is going and then I asked them, “Okay, of these weightings, who does the best job at delivering?”, every single model, Amazon is number one, Walmart is number two and you go down the list, Target, Best Buy, eBay-

Ben Thompson: They could be making stuff up, though.

Michael Morton: They could, they could.

• Benedict Evans released his latest slide deck, called AI eats the world. The content is so informative, even without hearing Evans deliver the presentation.

Video

• Finished watching The Beast In Me on Netflix, an excellent thriller. We loved this.
• Started watching the 2025 remastered Beatles Anthology on Disney+. I’m really looking forward to Elliot Roberts’ review of this version. Apparently some of the episodes are shorter than the original 1995 release, and there have been lots of ‘enhancements’ through the use of AI.

Web

• Microsoft hosted a ‘European Digital Commitment Day’ in Vienna, Austria. It was interesting to see this pop into my inbox given the narrative about digital sovereignty at the recent Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo. I assume this is a response to the growing number of companies that must be looking at their core technology dependence on a major US company such as Microsoft.
• I loved looking through Alice Bartlett’s collection of photos from her 10 years of working at the Financial Times. I’m not sure what she’s doing next, but I suspect she’ll be great at it.

Books

• Trying to make time to continue to read Jenny Odell’s How To Do Nothing: Resisting The Attention Economy. I smiled when I read this — being at home as a child on a weekday at an unusual time absolutely felt strange and unfamiliar:

Next week: Out with the WB-40 gang for our seasonal meetup, and dinner with old friends.