Things that Keep Us Awake At Night

Things that go BONG! in the night.

At midday on 21 August 2017, Big Ben, the bell at the heart of the great clock of the Houses of Parliament in London chimed 12 times and then fell silent. If all goes to plan Big Ben will not “bong” again until 2021, allowing essential repair and conservation work to be carried out. Its silencing was controversial, attracting even the prime minister’s concern. Across the Thames, however, at St ...

Things that go bang in the night.

What Keeps You Awake at Night?

Session overview What’s happening? What does the future hold? What keeps you awake at night? The times they are a-changin’. So sang Bob Dylan back in 1963. And those words still resonate today – whether in politics and society, or fundraising and the nonprofit sector. So what do advanced executives do? What cage-rattling questions (CRQs) do leaders ask? How do leaders use conversation as a core...

CPAP and things that go "burp" in the night.

Benchmarking Blunders and Things That Go Bump in the Night

Benchmarking—by which I mean any computer system that is driven by a controlled workload—is the ultimate in performance simulation. Aside from being a form of institutionalized cheating, it also offer countless opportunities for systematic mistakes in the way the workloads are applied and the resulting measurements interpreted. Right test, wrong conclusion is a ubiquitous mistake that happens b...