Ed Fowkes

Over the past century something rather interesting has been happening. Ownership has slowly begun to spread. Perhaps the most famous example in Britain is the John Lewis Partnership. John Spedan Lewis seems to have asked himself a philosophical question. Why should the people helping to create value not participate more directly in its rewards? At the time, this was a remarkably radical idea...

At this point, a natural question emerges. If value is concentrated and effort eventually dilutes it, how do I decide where to focus? This is where measurement enters and with it, a new layer of distortion. Charles Goodhart observed that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Now before I continue, I’ll just say “Data is golden.” However…

Beneath much of business, economics and technology sit recurring, structural patterns. Curves, distributions and constraints that appear again and again across nature, physics, networks and human behaviour. Once seen, they become difficult to ignore. And like much of science and its laws, the maths behind these patterns is hard to break or to work against.