‘Come up and get it Frank…!’ or ‘Why awards matter.’
At the 1934 Oscars, Will Rogers opened the envelope for Best Director and called out “Come up and get it, Frank!” Frank Capra stood up and set off for the stage. The winner was Frank Lloyd. Capra described the walk back to his table as “the longest, saddest, most shattering walk in my life”, which anyone who […]
‘La Vie en Rose’ or ‘Non, Je ne Regrette Rien’?
In my previous piece on the WEF’s Growth in the New Economy blueprint, I flagged five forces that should reshape how B2B technology vendors think about their partner ecosystems. One of them, the AI dilemma, is likely to land hardest and deserves its own treatment. To borrow from the language of the report, AI […]
The Growth Game is on. Stick or Twist?
The World Economic Forum ‘s Growth in the New Economy: Towards a Blueprint (April 2026) is, on the surface, a macroeconomic policy document for governments. Read it as a B2B tech channel leader, however, and it has plenty to say on the game of partner ecosystems in the next 5 years. The headline finding is striking. […]
All Change Please!
What the Victorian ‘Gauge War’ during the explosive growth of the railways tells us about the AI readiness gap in B2B technology channels. In the 1840s, Britain’s railway companies built their networks to incompatible standards. Brunel’s Great Western Railway ran on a magnificent seven-foot broad gauge, smoother, faster and technically superior to the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch standard gauge […]
Judgement Day is coming…(No, not that one)
There is a principle that has been running as a quiet thread through my recent posts, and I think it bears repeating for this one. Technology always accelerates execution before it enhances judgement. For example – It did this with the printing press. Gutenberg’s press had existed for about sixty years before Luther nailed his 95 Theses to […]
The Code Nobody Wrote
In my last two articles (found on Linkedin), I drew on research from the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Anthropic to argue that AI is not coming for the channel as a whole, but for the one-dimensional parts of it, faster than most partner programme designs acknowledge. I also argued that there is a window. A […]