You wouldn’t think that an academic book on grand strategy would have many lessons for managers. But John Lewis Gaddis’ On Grand Strategy does. He is a Pulitzer prize winning academic at Yale. He weaves a strong story with history and analysis. There are many points of interest but I want to focus on three Read More
Posts by Richard Sharpe
Musk wins US libel case with good arguments about social media
Elon Musk’s US lawyers used some interesting arguments to defend their client from the accusation of libel. Musk used the term “pedo guy” in a Tweet after Vernon Unsworth had turned down an offer by Musk to build a submarine to save the trapped Thai football team. Musk did not name Unsworth but Unsworth claimed Read More
Look to the end to have a lasting impact
So few writers and other communicators spend any time focusing on the end of the story they are telling. Many communicators spend a lot of time on the intro, the opening, how they introduce the piece. And rightly so. That’s where you grab your audience, get their attention and hopefully keep it. Focus on the Read More
Bowie photo copyright infringement
Here’s a true story about copyright: it shows how careful we all need to be. A hospitality company suddenly gets an email from ImageRights International, a US copyright agency, asking for £1,700. The agency says it has found a picture of the interior of one of the hospitality company’s joints which has the famous Read More
Bribery allegations against Ferguson in court case
Sir Alex Ferguson took a £30,000 gold Rolex watch as a bribe to fix a football match at Manchester United, a court was told last week. Before you rush away and tweet this surprising piece of news look at the end of the sentence: “a court was told last week”. “The court was told” There’s a Read More
Stokes story shows BBC needs to train presenters in privacy law
The Ben Stokes “news story” has revealed a gross lack of understanding of the privacy laws by the BBC Radio 4 presenter of the afternoon news program PM, Evan Davis. Her should really know better given the rising importance of this law. The BBC decided not to give the details splashed over the Read More
Opening up the copyright debate again
CC Greyweed https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/ unchanged You might have thought that the mighty Viacom versus YouTube case had settled all of the main issues about sharing platforms and copyright. YouTube won the 2007 case with the defence that it was an innocent platform that took down any infringing material when it was notified on it. This cleared the legal way for Read More
Threat of libel on social media drops again
Great news for creators of social media: the threat of libel has dropped again. Users of social media “read” its content in a casual way and did not pause to reflect. This new ruling of the Supreme Court says that dictionary definitions of words and elaborate analysis cannot be applied to social media. A new Read More
Stunning RoI for elearning
I’ve got a simple, solid argument that training professional and managerial staff provides a good return on investment (RoI). Put more in and you get more out. That’s a controversial statement. Even more controversial is my claim that you need only a 0.33% increase in productivity to justify buying some elearning courses. There are hundreds of ways Read More
Win one, lose one in social media libel ruling by the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has made two important rulings covering twitter, Facebook and libel. They affect how large a group of viewers needs to be and what words mean on twitter. One is good for the claimant: the other is good for the defence. A woman published a tweet to her ex-husband’s new partner that he Read More