Andrew Doran

We have this sign painted on a wall in our office in Johannesburg. Every time I walk past it, my inner radio sings “brings people together” in the voice of George Michael, adding “…it’s just a matter of tiiiiime.” After getting home from Cairo on Thursday night, I had just two nights at home before heading back to Heathrow on Saturday afternoon for a trip to Johannesburg. The last time I was there was at the end of June in the middle of winter; October is a much better time to visit, with the…

Looking out from my balcony at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Cairo, Egypt These weeknotes are over a week late. It’s been a busy time. After finishing up with work on Friday evening, I leapt straight for the ironing board to get a new set of work shirts ready for the following week. On Saturday morning, just after 6am, a taxi picked me up to take me to Heathrow for a flight to Cairo. In Egypt, the working week is Sunday to Thursday, which meant that I had a one-day weekend, which I spent travelling.…

Looking out at Millwall Inner Dock, 24 September 2026 A hectic week that, looking back, felt much longer than it was. Autumn is coming, making itself felt on Monday on my walk down to the train station; I kept swapping the hand I was using to carry a bag, burying the other one in a trouser pocket to keep warm. This was a week in which I: Dealt with a very busy Monday, including reflecting on how written communications are so much harder to understand than face-to-face or even audio-only…

Trying to work with an intermittent connection to the internet. The fact that Teams messages end up in a ‘failed to send’ or ‘failed to schedule’ state instead of being queued is very frustrating. Is a poor network connection an edge case now?

Finished reading Good Bye: Leading change better by attending to endings by Lizzie Bentley Bowers and Alison Lucas. I completely agree with the authors that paying attention to endings and ensuring that they are well-marked is important. There are some useful anecdotes and exercises in this book for anyone in a leadership position to read and reflect on endings done well, and endings done poorly. But overall, it felt as though it could have been an article. Stretching it out into a book, with…

I’m at Album Club #187. I know Crash from when I was a kid, but have never heard the rest of the album.

I can’t remember the last time that I worked from home for two days in a row. It felt strange to leave my work laptop at my desk at the end of the first day, knowing that in the morning I would just pick up from where I left off. I guess I’m now fully acclimatised to mainly being in the office again. This week, we had some important visitors at our office on Friday, which meant that many of us planned to go in, bumping my scheduled days at home to earlier in the week. I love this time of year.…

Whether you love it or hate it, I don’t think there is any denying that generative AI is an incredible technical achievement. I use Claude, ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot multiple times a day for all kinds of different things. But I’ve been struggling with questions about the technology that nobody around me seems readily able to answer. Worryingly — I think — I also rarely come across anyone else asking these questions. In a work context, there is pressure to get on and deploy this technology…

In the middle of this week I got some clarity at work about the process we are following for a significant upcoming change. It put my mind at ease to hear that we’re doing all the right things. It’s still going to take some time, but I’m happy to know what we’re planning to do. This was a week in which I: Learned what a ‘capstone course’ is, and started thinking about what projects at work might be a good size and shape for a group of students to tackle. Helped a colleague to start to put…

What fresh hell is this?

Looking back, I’d forgotten that Monday was a bank holiday. It certainly didn’t feel like a four-day week. We’ve known for months that the end of an era is approaching at work, but it still isn’t clear as to what comes next. So while there is plenty to do, and everyone is getting on with their initiatives, there is also a sense of treading water until we know what direction to swim in. This was a week in which I: Continued cleaning up tasks from old meeting notes, getting on top of the backlog.…

Finished reading Letter from an Unknown Woman and Other Stories by Stefan Zweig. This was perfect to read just before bed to take my brain off to another time and place; undemanding but poignant. I love his writing.

With this many crisps, it can only be an Album Club. August has been a strange month to work through. The office has been quieter than usual as people have been off for their summer holidays. Unintuitively, the emptier the office is, the harder it is to concentrate, as your ears tune in to individual conversations. I’m hoping that things will get bustling again as the calendar flips to September. This was a week in which I: Got plugged into an AI forum and turned up with a bunch of questions on…

The temperature dropped by about ten degrees, bringing clouds and even a little bit of rain. I went in search of a pair of jeans for the first time in a couple of months, putting away the shorts for a while. I promise I’ll never complain about regular old ‘mildly warm’ British weather ever again. It’s lovely right now. Work-wise, this week was a challenge. There are some big changes happening that bring some uncertainty, and by the end of the week I felt that I was even further away from…

Finished reading Steve Marriott: All Too Beautiful by Paolo Hewitt and John Hellier. I’ve been a big Small Faces fan since I was a teenager in the 1990s. I knew the basic story arc of Steve Marriott’s life, but this filled in lots of the detail. The book makes the point that if Marriott had survived a few more years beyond his horrible death in 1991, he would surely have had a big renaissance through the Britpop crowd. An informative read, but I found the writing style really grating in places.

I’ve been thinking more about these weeknotes, pondering whether it’s time to explore a different format. Six years ago, I made a note that I was inspired by Ton Zijlstra’s format, and it’s served me well. But I’ve stopped looking forward to documenting my week as much as I used to. Part of my reluctance to change is that I feel like I have less time than I did before, and that writing more freely will take more of it. Somehow — and I don’t know how — I used to sit down to write, edit and…

Back to work after being out of the office for a couple of weeks. I’d left myself a reminder to go to the right location, as we’d had a seating shuffle while I’d been away. We had an extraordinary number of people saying that they were cold at their new desks, but, weirdly, the complaints were distributed across the whole office. From the data, we could see that it had been gradually getting colder everywhere in our space over the past few weeks. I’m not sure what the opposite of ‘boiling…

I was about to use the word ‘proscribed‘ in an email. Something made me pause to double check what it means. It turns out that it means literally the complete opposite of what I thought.

Looking out over the valley towards Lucca. We spent this week on holiday in Tuscany, Italy, with eight of our friends. Our summer break was planned to be early this year as our eldest son heads back to university next week. This holiday came and went in a flash, as they always do. Our home for the week was Il Gelsomino Bianco, a villa in the Brancoli hills, north of Lucca. A stone in the wall of the guest house was marked with the year 1729, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the whole villa was at…

A stop to look at the view on the Isle of Wight. We only have another couple of weeks together as a family before our eldest heads back to start his sophomore year at college in Texas. Our youngest finished school last week, so my wife suggested that I take the week off and do something with both of the boys. Now that they are both into road cycling, the obvious ‘something’ was to plan a big bike ride. I wanted a distance that would be achievable for everyone, but significant enough to justify…

Finished reading Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Tempest. My copy of the book came free with my ticket to see Tempest in conversation at The Roundhouse back in April. During the interview, he spoke movingly about “the incredible technology” of a novel, which allows you to put yourself in another person’s shoes, feel what they feel, and take that with you back into your everyday life. The best things I read are always those where I get a glimpse into someone else’s lived experience that I have…

I love it when a high street shop gets renovated, and the ghost of what was there long ago makes a brief reappearance. Jean’s Hair Fashions, which apparently was once a feature of Lower Kings Road in Berkhamsted. It seems that one thing that Berkhamsted has been consistent with throughout the ages is that there is no shortage of places to get your hair done.

Waiting for the start of Glengarry Glen Ross at The Old Vic theatre, 13 July 2026 A really big week. We spent the first three days on a management team offsite. It was bittersweet, as it was the last one we will have with someone in our team who is retiring later this year. We hadn’t been all together in the same place for about two and a half years, and it was excellent to reconnect with each other as a group. We spent the first day at The Old Vic theatre, with excellent professional coaches…

The latest heatwave has weighed heavily on everyone here. It is just too hot. All of my time seems to be spent working, watching World Cup football, or lying on my bed without any covering, hoping that I will be able to sleep. On Thursday I met one of my neighbours on the train and he offered to give me a lift home. Our conversation turned, naturally, to how everyone is coping with the heat. He revealed that he and his wife have two fans in their bedroom. It left me wondering why I hadn’t…

Finished reading Tsunami Kids by Paul Forkan and Rob Forkan. An incredible story of their unconventional upbringing, the tragic events of Boxing Day 2004, and their subsequent business success. For me, the book is let down a little by the writing style and a lack of editing, which stopped it from being a totally gripping page-turner. But the story is the main thing that I came away with. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like to go through such a life-changing catastrophe.

Lining up at the start of the JPMorganChase Corporate Challenge A fully-packed week with plenty going on. Multiple days of back-to-back meetings coupled with things happening in the evenings. And when things weren’t happening, the football was on. The football is always on. This was a week in which I: Have been really enjoying having an intern in the team. It has got me thinking about how much context someone gathers over many years of working that someone new to the workforce doesn’t have. The…

A swan and their cygnets on the bank of the River Bulbourne by The Old Mill, Berkhamsted. Boiling. In the UK we are not equipped to live through day after day of mid-30s°C heat, with the temperature only dropping into the mid-20s overnight with barely a breeze in the air. Sleeping was a tough gig, lying on top of our bed with a fan trying its best to help us get some rest. You wake up hot and dehydrated, lusting after a shower set to a cold temperature that you previously could never have…

My regular morning view from the hotel gym, looking out across the Rosebank suburb of Johannesburg. When last week’s Sun City-based conference was announced, I decided to extend my stay in South Africa so that I could spend some time with our team members who are based there. It wasn’t perfect timing; Tuesday was a public holiday for Youth Day, so many people chose to take Monday as leave in order to get a four-day weekend. But the time I did get to spend with the team and other colleagues from…

Just randomly recalled that as a kid, we used to say ‘fainites’ when asking for mercy or a time out. I thought it was a weird word made up amongst some friends. It turns out that it was a real word used throughout southern England.

An intriguing, ill-fitting door in the wall at Lancaster Gate tube station. Who knows what is hidden behind it? Two days in the office followed by two conferences, one in London and another in Sun City, South Africa. The morning agenda for the Gartner UK & Ireland CIO Community Executive Summit, 10 June 2026 On Tuesday evening and all day Wednesday I attended the Gartner UK & Ireland CIO Community Executive Summit for the first time. Compared to other Gartner conferences, this one is very…