Inauguration

A couple of years ago I was on holiday in Playa Blanca, Lanzarote, drank a fair bit of Bodega Stratus wine over a fabulous lunch in the Plaza of the Princessa Yaiza, and that afternoon set up The Strategy Exchange (now www.thestrategyexchange.co.uk/blog) as my first blogging venture.  I found that the blog format, the 21st Century version of Montaigne's conception of the 'essay', bridged the gap between my compulsion to write stuff and my lack of sufficient discipline actually to tackle a book.  I've written a lot of first chapters over the years.

In time The Strategy Exchange morphed from being my blog into being a business, and though the blog survives it leaves me with a gap in two respects.  Firstly, there's a lot of stuff which is part of what I am, and which I'd like to write about, that simply wouldn't be appropriate for what has become a corporate site.  And secondly, people are actually reading The Strategy Exchange Blog.

So The Xris Project came into being as a place for me to capture thoughts and such about the rest of me.  It's an artificial division of course.  The strategist that enjoys hacking business models and the conditions for competitive advantage is the same strategist that enjoys chess and martial arts.  The strategist that mines the worlds of technology, economics, politics, social science and (especially) the overlaps between them for 'drivers of change' that apply to corporate and business contingent strategic planning is the same strategist that mines these fields just for the hell of it.

But over time The Strategy Exchange has necessarily become, if not more 'formal', maybe a bit more limited in scope.  Certainly less useful (as originally intended) as a dustbin for all the stuff on 'the cutting room floor', to quote my friend, facilitator and strategic planner, Adrian Nixon.

So The Xris Project is my 'other place'.  A bit more relaxed, broader in scope.  I've described it as a thematic journal because I'm intending to blog about stuff that comes to me in the flow of life, but I've never been one to journal mechanically, on a temporal basis.

In particular, it's not really a blog that is intended to be read.  I'm not sure who would read it.  Maybe the wonders of tagging will make some specific themes of interest to specific people, I don't know.  I'll try and pay attention to this.  But why someone who is interested in the conditioning of alactic energy systems would also have an interest in quantum computing or 15th Century German fencing manuals is beyond me.  And that, of course, includes myself.

Xris, by the way, is more or less the Greek spelling of my name.  I find that it's more useful than 'chris' when hunting for unused user names...