Negotiating with a change of leadership isn’t easy

I was watching the recent discussion and failed negotiations between Zelenskyy, Trump and JD Vance at the White House. It went badly. For everybody. And I think that the set up could only have gone badly. It also reminded me of a few excellent relationships I’ve had with customers and/or suppliers which have been spoiled by changes of leadership, so I thought it worth a bit of discussion here. I’ve also had relationships sail along happily, or even improve, with leadership changes. So a change isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are definitely some traps and characters to watch out for.

This is especially true if you sell a complex service, like branding, business consultancy, software design, development and similar.

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Will there be a successful WordPress fork?

Lately, the WordPress community and even the broader web community has spent a lot of time thinking about WordPress and what might happen with respect to a fork. All largely kicked off by the huge spat Matt Mullenweg has had with WP Engine that has already resulted in legal action against him, which he is now framing as legal action against the WordPress project.

It’s not necessary here to cover the history of this battle, where it originates from, and where it’s likely to lead because it’s beautifully documented literally everywhere. You could get a solid roundup by scanning WordPress forums around the place, or the WPDrama subreddit.

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2024 – A recovery year of experiences to make 2025 a banger

I’m going to cut straight to it. 2024 wasn’t easy for me in business. In life it was good. I’ve continued with feeling healthy after my heart issues – in fact, it marked five years since I had my heart attack.

I had a few key takeaways to note down:

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A review of Nitin Sawhney’s Heart Suite

Bit of a disclaimer – I’m not a music critic by trade. But I am someone who survived a heart attack. So I have some skin in this game. I also didn’t go expecting to be writing a review, but as it seems nobody else has done one I couldn’t let this go.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to be at the premiere of Nitin Sawhney’s Heart Suite which, in music, tells the tale of Nitin’s experience with a heart attack. His heart attack experience was more severe than mine – he passed out at one point, falling and cutting his face up, then waking up with paramedics urgently helping him out and rushing him to St George’s hospital in London. It meant he’d postponed a performance with the Hallé orchestra planned for May. I believe this was the show.

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What the hell Jaguar? Let’s take a look at the Type 00

Car design isn’t for the faint hearted – it’s a high stakes world where hundreds of millions are spent on design, development, preparing production, passing regulations, and driving demand. And you can only do safe and evolutionary designs if your customers are buying those things. Jaguar, bless it, has always struggled to make money – constantly squeezed between luxury brands and premium brands, it never seemed to know where it fitted. Budget Aston Martin equivalent or BMW rival?

Then came the Type 00. And boy did it get attention. Right from the beginning, they dropped a fashion show inspired ident video which created a social media storm – a lot negative, especially from older, male viewers. Even the likes of Nigel Farage and Elon Musk chimed in with their quickly formed negative opinions. Musk, of course, owns a car company, so he’s going to use his reach to knock a competitor.

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Back to basics

In recent times I’ve started to find myself more and more interested in stepping away from success. Successful teams, people, companies. I don’t mean people who are likely to be like you and me. I mean the big bosses, the billionaires, the Premier League teams… the winners.

I’m just tired. I’ve watched the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, acting like a teenager on his own social media platform. I’ve seen the super wealthy Matt Mullenweg and his eponymous Automattic, creating a fight between what he supposes is the WordPress community and WP Engine. WP Engine is the biggest of WordPress hosts out there, and worth, I dunno… a billion. Both are big big players. People in the WordPress community are not big players, by and large. Any tall poppies that come along risk being cut down by the always smiling, always affable in interviews, Mullenweg. It happened when he was OK with copying the yet to be released Drupal base theme, it happened when he pulled lots of themes by small firms from the WordPress repo, and it’s happening plenty of times since and until the WP Engine battle.

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Hertz doubled the cost of my car rental. Here’s their process design trick.

This year, during my family holiday, I discovered how Hertz – and many other car hire companies – have crafted a process involving dark patterns to trick stressed travellers into paying far more than necessary for their car hire.

I’ve used Hertz several times over the years, particularly in the 2000s, so I expected good service, a decent car, and straightforward business.

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Taller buildings let us design better towns

I lived in a range of places as a kid, partly because my father was a bit of an itinerant who didn’t know what he wanted in life, other than that I mustn’t live with my mother. Go figure.

Eventually I got to settle down with my grandmother, but in the process I learned a lot about life as a child in different places. Where I felt safe and where I did not.

I did not feel safe in large council estates surrounding cities. I did feel safe in a caravan park. I did not feel safe in a city centre. I did feel safe in a built up part of a large city, living in an apartment block.

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Don’t design in customer traps on your systems

You know that friend, the one who always promises to help you move flat, or help you fix your mower, but then doesn’t turn up? Yes. Or the guy who goes on a date and pays for the meal and somehow that comes with access to your body? Or the airline that makes you think you have to pay for a seat upgrade in order to take any baggage on board when actually you don’t?

The first two are obvious red flags. We all know people like this, and once we’re done excusing their behaviour we tend to move on. They’re often charming people at first. They have to be. They keep needing new friends and new partners, so they get really good at the introductory gab. But as I always say, the only perfect people in this world are people you don’t know very well yet.

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A new manifesto for the web

This blog post has now been re-arranged with the manifesto at the top, and the reasoning that led up to it beneath. Because, after all, placing the important content six or seven hundred words in is hardly being pure, is it?

Web Dogma 24. By me.

Content First. All articles, images, and graphics must be there to serve a purpose. Superficial or filler material is forbidden.

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