This is a great illustration of why you want to recruit the best possible people to your team.

11 Norwegian professional footballers vs 22 Sunday League players.

You don’t always need MORE people, sometimes you want BETTER people.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

Rory Sutherland spoke at BoS Europe and recommended the following reading list for people interesting in neuroscience and the Business of Software.

• Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast & Thinking Slow.
• Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone Else is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind.
• Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life.
• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
• Stuart Sutherland and Ben Goldacre, Irrationality: The Enemy Within.
• Robert H. Frank, The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good.
• Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.
• Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
• Douglas T. Kenrick & Vladas Griskevicius, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think.

Any other recommendations?

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

Machine Zone CEO, Gabe Leydon’s talk at ReCode Conference left the audience of advertising people shocked, angry and confused. Largely because while gabe uses a lot of TV advertising, he uses far more of his dollars online and knows more about measuring the effectiveness of advertising than the rest of the room put together.

The advertising industry will have to change.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

Why Are Bald Men Under-Represented in Senior Management?

Cambridge Ring Award winner, Rosemary Francis, CEO Founder of Ellexus, was awarded ‘Product of the Year’ at this year’s annual dinner. She is the first female award winner and there was much discussion amongst the men present about how more women could be encouraged into the software industry.

Here’s Rosemary talking on that very subject…

Rosemary Francis, CEO, Ellexus, Why Are Bald Men Under-Represented in Senior Management?

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

Yes.

Scary, fascinating stuff. Research shows that people are generally nice and well meaning but this leaves them open to being hacked.

Image links to full paper.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.

“Data is the New Oil” is the New, “Faster Horses”

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Henry Ford

No he didn’t. (This is a great article in Harvard Business Review that both dispels the myth whilst pointing out that Henry Ford did indeed ignore his customers to the significant long term detriment of the business). I hate it when this quote is run out by ‘Thought Leaders‘ and ‘International Keynote Speakers‘ (according to their LinkedIn profiles anyway) at conferences as proof that to be innovative you have to be bold or whatever. I have banned speakers from using it at our events.

The new meaningless phrase that is tweeted, quoted and bandied about with absurd regularity is:

Only the Paranoid Will Survive.

So much misinformation, propaganda, marketing hype and general BS about the Apple vs FBI iPhone discussion it is beginning to resemble a political ‘debate’ about the election of a new President or whether Britain should leave the EU…

This is an email from Martin Kleppmann who knows his stuff when it comes to technology unlike anyone in political office today.

Please consider dropping your MP a line or sharing this more widely.

Our future is at stake.

Hillary Clinton’s speech payments.

This is a list of paid speeches (where payment was over $100,000) made by Hillary Clinton in 2013-14.

Still, over $500,000 in a single day from tech companies isn’t bad going.

Qualcomm, Cisco and eBay compete with the Jewish United Fund, the Biotechnology Industry Organization and the National Automobile Dealers Association to pay the most for her words but Knewton, the education-focused startup paid $225,000 for a talk in 2014 – lobbying is an expensive business.

The BLN is now Business of Software

Business of Software runs conferences for people that build great software businesses and products. To access talks online, hear about new events, contact speakers and stay in touch with great ideas, share your email address with us.