09 Monday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
The Editorial Team
Here are the most important lessons you can learn from goodstrat.com. These are distilled from the site’s essays, blog posts, and strategic frameworks around data, governance, and technology.
08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Artificial Intelligence, business strategy, Critical Thinking, data architecture, data governance, data mesh, data-strategy, Tech Hype
The Editorial Team
Here are the most important lessons you can learn from goodstrat.com. These are distilled from the site’s essays, blog posts, and strategic frameworks around data, governance, and technology.
08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, book review, data architecture, Financial Transparency, Global Finance, Public Policy, Tax evasion
By Samantha Sterling Parker, Spanish FT Weekend
Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026
To say that Martyn Jones’s Revealing Wealth is merely a book about tax evasion is like saying the Large Hadron Collider is just a fancy pipe. This is a manifesto for a digital revolution, a technical blueprint for global equity, and a provocative call to arms that arrives just as the old financial order begins to crack.
Below is a look at this seminal work through three distinct editorial lenses.
Continue reading08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, book review, data architecture, Financial Transparency, Global Finance, Public Policy, Tax evasion
By Samantha Sterling Parker, Long FT Weekend
Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026
Book Review: Revealing Wealth: Combatting Tax Evasion with Data, Political Will and Technology by Martyn Jones
In an age defined by algorithms, trillion-dollar tech companies, and data flowing across borders at the speed of light, one of the oldest problems in civilisation persists: how the wealthy avoid paying their share of tax. In Revealing Wealth, Martyn Jones argues that the real scandal is not simply that tax evasion exists, but that in a data-rich world we still allow it to thrive.
Continue reading08 Sunday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, book review, data architecture, Financial Transparency, Global Finance, Public Policy, Tax evasion
By Melanie Rodham Jenkins
Reviewed by Afilonius Rex, for FT Weekend
Madrid, Monday 9th March 2026
In an era when wealth inequality feels like an intractable virus, Martyn Jones’s Revealing Wealth: Combatting Tax Evasion with Data, Political Will and Technology arrives as a potent antidote – or at least a blueprint for one. Published in 2025, this ambitious tome blends technical savvy with moral urgency, proposing a global “World Asset Register” (WAR) to unmask hidden fortunes. Jones, a data architecture veteran once hailed as one of the world’s top information experts, teams up with his alter ego, Afilonius Rex – a pseudonym for a collective of contrarian thinkers – to argue that technology can pierce the veil of offshore secrecy. But as Gillian Tett might observe, drawing from her anthropological lens on finance, this isn’t just about algorithms and databases; it’s about the cultural rituals of power, where the ultra-rich perform elaborate dances to evade civic duty, leaving the rest of us footing the bill.
Continue reading07 Saturday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book review, Camino de Santiago, Celtic Culture, European Politics, galicia, literature, Speculative Fiction, Wales
Celtic, European and Worldly
In Celtic Domination: The Most Significant Influencers, Martyn de Tours (a pseudonym of the prolific, contrarian strategist Martyn Jones) has produced a work that is at once a novel, a manifesto, a pilgrimage memoir, and a speculative blueprint for pan-Celtic resurgence. Published in 2025 and running to some 428 pages in its paperback edition, the book arrives like a fever dream dispatched from the Camino de Santiago, where the author has evidently spent considerable time walking, talking, and ruminating. The result is a text that defies easy categorization, part sibling reunion laced with intrigue, part philosophical treatise on identity and power, part utopian pamphlet for a “Celtic Union”, and yet it coheres, after a fashion, through sheer audacity and the insistent pulse of its Celtic romanticism.
Continue reading06 Friday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, book review, data architecture, data governance, data management, data mesh, Data Warehouse, data-strategy, Tech Satire
The Bonfire of the Vacuous
Paula Prada Price, New College Tech Review, Notting Hill, Friday, 6th March 2026
Martyn Jones’s F*CK DATA MESH is a bracing, profane, and essential Broadside against the Silicon Valley hype machine.*
In the glittering circus of modern data tech, where vendors hawk “revolutionary” architectures like snake oil at a Silicon Valley swap meet, Martyn Jones has lobbed what can only be described as a literary Molotov cocktail titled F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge. It’s less a book than a gleefully profane haymaker aimed squarely at the jaw of the industry’s latest sacred cow. And reader, it connects.
Continue reading06 Friday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, book review, data architecture, data governance, data management, data mesh, Data Warehouse, data-strategy, Tech Satire
The Bonfire of the Vacuous
Lady Amanda Percival, The Wired Wire, Kensington, Friday, 6th March 2026
Martyn Jones’s F*CK DATA MESH is a bracing, profane, and essential Broadside against the Silicon Valley hype machine.*
In the hushed boardrooms of the Fortune 500, “Data Mesh” has become the latest secular religion. It promises a decentralized utopia where data is treated as a product and domain owners are liberated from the “monolithic” tyranny of the central data warehouse. But according to Martyn Jones, a man whose career has seen the rise and fall of more tech fads than a McKinsey slide deck, this new paradigm is less of a revolution and more of a “fraudulent flim-flam sauce” served up by consultants looking for their next utilization spike.
Continue reading05 Thursday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, book review, data architecture, data governance, data management, data mesh, Data Warehouse, data-strategy, Tech Satire
The Bonfire of the Clowns
F*CK DATA MESH: A polemic against fashionable nonsense in the data economy
Alicia Altmann, The Middle Digital Review, Chicago, 5th March 2026.
In the technology industry, few phrases age faster than the latest architectural revolution. “Serverless”, “big data”, “blockchain”, each arrives with evangelical certainty before quietly settling into the background noise of enterprise IT. Into this cycle of hype steps Martyn Jones’s gleefully abrasive book, F*CK DATA MESH: The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge*. Its title alone signals that this is less a manual than a polemic: a sharply written protest against what the author sees as the fashionable amnesia of modern data discourse.
Continue reading05 Thursday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, book review, data architecture, data governance, data management, data mesh, Data Warehouse, data-strategy, Tech Satire
The Bonfire of the Imbeciles
F*ck Data Mesh: Martyn Jones’s Hilarious Haymaker at Tech’s Data Delusions
Review by Bella Carmela, WiredWiredWired, Silicon Valley, Thursday 5th March 2026
In the hyper-connected, AI-obsessed circus of modern enterprise tech, where every startup pitches a “revolutionary” data paradigm like it’s the next iPhone, Martyn Jones drops a bomb: Fck Data Mesh*. Subtitled The Far Side of Data, Information, and Knowledge, this 2025 manifesto isn’t your typical dry treatise on ETL pipelines or cloud migrations. It’s a rollicking, profane takedown of the industry’s sacred cows… Data Mesh, Lakehouses, and the endless hype cycle that turns solid data strategies into vaporware. Written with the acerbic wit of a Welsh data veteran who’s seen it all (from mainframes to metadata meltdowns), Jones channels the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson meets Dilbert, urging businesses to wake up before their next “transformative” initiative sinks another billion into the swamp.
Continue reading04 Wednesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book review, Diplomacy, Foreign Policy, geopolitics, Global Politics, International Relations, leadership, Political Philosophy
A Plague On All of Their Houses
By Rebecca Kennedy, The Observer, Chelsea, Wednesday 4th March 2026
The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery By Martyn Jones (martyn.es, 2025)
In the grand sweep of history, as Paul Kennedy might observe, empires rise and fall not merely through the clash of arms or the ebb of economic tides, but through the erosion of moral sinews that bind societies and their leaders. Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour echoes this Kennedy-esque thesis, charting the precipitous decline of integrity in global politics from the unipolar illusions of the post-Cold War era to the brazen thuggery of contemporary strongmen. Written over a quarter-century, this sprawling polemic, part historical autopsy, part diplomatic jeremiad, dissects how the United States, once the self-anointed guardian of liberal order, has devolved into a “basket case” of strategic incoherence, abetted by neoliberal hubris and neoconservative adventurism. Jones, a data strategist turned contrarian commentator, draws on a lifetime of observation, from Welsh nationalism to Spanish socialism, to argue that honour’s demise has unleashed a world of “global thuggery,” where power is wielded not with restraint but as a blunt instrument of self-interest.
Continue reading03 Tuesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book review, business strategy, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coaching, leadership, Management, Organizational Culture, Servant Leadership
By Stephanie Charming, Madrid, Tuesday 3rd March 2026
In the annals of leadership literature, few works pierce the fog of modern managerial sophistry with the precision of a well-aimed bayonet charge. Martyn Jones’s Good Leader/Bad Leader: The Difference and Why It Matters stands as a clarion call to arms, a treatise that dissects the anatomy of command with the surgical acuity of Sun Tzu and the unflinching moral rigour of Marcus Aurelius. As a veteran strategist in the digital trenches, once hailed as one of the world’s top database minds, Jones draws not from ivory-tower abstractions but from the bloodied fields of corporate and public service battles. His book is no mere manual; it is a manifesto for the embattled leader, a compass for navigating the treacherous terrains of human ambition and institutional decay.
Continue reading03 Tuesday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book review, business strategy, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coaching, leadership, Management, Organizational Culture, Servant Leadership
By Stephanie Charming, Madrid, Tuesday 3rd March 2026
In Good Leader/Bad Leader: The difference and why it matters, Martyn Jones sets himself an unfashionable task. At a time when leadership literature is awash with nuance, frameworks and neurobiological footnotes, he returns to first principles: good is good; bad is bad. And the distinction, he insists, is neither academic nor optional.
Continue reading02 Monday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
book review, business strategy, Emotional Intelligence, Executive Coaching, leadership, Management, Organizational Culture, Servant Leadership
By Jennifer Bartlett, Chelsea, Monday 2nd March 2026
In Good Leader / Bad Leader: The difference and why it matters, Martyn Jones provides a visceral, unfiltered, and deeply philosophical examination of leadership that eschews the sanitised language of modern corporate manuals. Jones, a veteran consultant with four decades of experience advising global giants like Adidas, IBM, and the United Nations, crafts a manifesto that is part ethical treatise and part practical field guide for the “leadership masochist”.
Continue reading02 Monday Mar 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
AI Governance, Artificial Intelligence, Davos, Future of Work, geopolitics, Global Economy, Tech Satire, World Economic Forum
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid, Monday 2nd March 2026
Oh, for fuck’s sake, Dirndal Barr, you gleaming beacon of LockedOut futurism, you’ve done it again. March 2, 2026, the snow’s still settling on the Davos chalets, the private jets are queuing for takeoff like taxis at a funeral, and here you are, posting your pre-packaged “What Are The Real Questions Leaders Will Be Asking At Davos 2026?” like it’s some brave exposé rather than the world’s most expensive press release. You’re not a futurist, Benny. You’re a futurist-shaped content mill with 5 million followers who all clicked “Follow” in the hope you’d one day say something that wasn’t sponsored by the ghost of McKinsey.Let’s start with the official theme: “A Spirit Of Dialogue”. Beautiful. Nothing screams authentic conversation like locking up 3,000 of the richest, most insulated people on earth in a Swiss village so they can talk about how the rest of us should talk better.
Continue reading25 Wednesday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Tech, Digital Culture, Free Speech, LinkedIn, social media, Surveillance Capitalism, Tech Ethics, Tech Satire
Madrid, Wednesday 25th February 2026
Prometheus Unhinged: A Vital Wake-Up Call in the Age of Digital Feudalism
In an era where our every scroll, like, and share feeds the insatiable algorithms of Silicon Valley overlords, a bold new talk show has emerged as a beacon of unflinching critique. “Prometheus Unhinged – Social Media Is Amoral, Depraved and Degenerate,” hosted by Martyn Jones of Goodstrat and broadcast across a consortium of global media outlets including the BBC, RTVE, CNN, and FT Weekend, is no mere panel discussion. It’s a razor-sharp dissection of the chasm between social media’s utopian promises and its dystopian realities. Launched on February 25, 2026, this episode – available at goodstrat.com – assembles a formidable roster of journalists and commentators to expose the platforms we inhabit as nothing short of modern feudal empires. Far from the finger-wagging moralism that plagues much tech commentary, this is witty, acerbic, and profoundly humane, reminding us why independent voices matter in a world dominated by billionaire whims.
Continue reading24 Tuesday Feb 2026
Tags
agile, business strategy, IT Strategy, project management, safe, Scaled Agile Framework, scrum, Software Development
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Madrid, Wednesday 25th February 2026.
Seven years on, the verdict is in, and it’s not flattering. Back in 2019, in a Brussels-fuelled rant channelling the incomparable Bob Hoffman, I declared Agile at Scale the next frontier of IT bullshit: immature, ill-conceived, supercilious, and emphatically not agile. It killed communication with jargon, turned criticism into heresy, and mangled history by ignoring what actually worked. I called it a cultish Frankenstein of Scientology zeal, Vatican pomp, and authoritarian quirks – all wrapped in vainglorious slide decks.
Continue reading24 Tuesday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
business strategy, Critical Thinking, data architecture, data governance, data management, data-strategy, Decision Making, Organizational Culture
Madrid, Wednesday 25th February 2026
Sir Afilonius Rex: Welcome to this week’s Fundamentals in Focus, brought to you by the BBC, RTVE, NRD, CNN, S4C, FT Weekend and RTE.
This week’s panel consists of Annie Tusk, senior correspondent at The Guardian, Jilly Penn, columnist of the Financial Times, Martyn Jones of Goodstrat, the highly respected Alice Sauzgatillo of Spain’s RTVE, the veteran great, King Larry, and Juliette Brioche of Le Canard Enchainé.
The questions for today are:
24 Tuesday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, business intelligence, data governance, data management, Data Quality, LinkedIn Culture, power-bi, Tech Satire
The Good Strat Board
Tuesday 24th February 2026
Right, so imagine this: it’s a Sunday in 2026, and somewhere in the digital equivalent of a greasy spoon café with flickering neon and a faint smell of burnt metadata, a group of data professionals has gathered round a table that’s less “round table discussion” and more “round table of the apocalypse”. They’ve had three coffees each, none of them decaf, and they’re absolutely livid about LinkedIn. Not the platform itself, you understand – though God knows it deserves it – but the absolute carnival of self-congratulatory lunacy that passes for “thought leadership” in the data world.
Continue reading22 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
Big Data, business intelligence, data governance, data management, Data Quality, LinkedIn Culture, power-bi, Tech Satire
THE SUNDAYS RANTS – The Great Data Grift, LockedIn Lunatics and the Death of Sense – 20260222
In this no-holds-barred Sunday roast, our battle-weary host and a panel of sharp-tongued data veterans, Smart Alex, George Melly, Yours Stewly, Mark Marx, and the indomitable Sir Afi, lay waste to the performative circus of LockedIn thought leadership. From endless 14-slide carousels promising “self-healing dashboards” and “100% trust” via GenAI, to £997 masterclasses in buzzword alchemy, over-caffeinated gurus flooding feeds with five daily posts about AI-powered stewardship, governance zombies, and rainbow-vomiting BI masterpieces, these self-appointed prophets are dissected with ruthless wit and medieval flair. Expect rants on hallucinating AI stewards, rancid data lakes masquerading as oil, cultural transformation workshops that change nothing but bank balances, and a clarion call to mute the emoji hordes, demand real DAX proofs, and reclaim feeds for quiet virtue over vapourware. A cathartic, coffee-fuelled takedown of the grift keeping data professionals scrolling in despair, because sometimes the only way to restore sense is to rant it back into existence.
Continue reading15 Sunday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain.
Tags
business intelligence, data analytics, data-strategy, end-user-computing, innovation, IT Governance, Self-Service BI, Shadow IT
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Oza-Cesuras, Sunday 15th February 2026
In the quiet underbelly of corporate life, sanctioned software often lags behind real needs. Shadow apps, which are unsanctioned tools employees adopt on their own, continue to flourish. Nowhere is their value more pronounced than in data analytics. Teams quietly sidestep lengthy procurement and rigid platforms. They harness spreadsheets, personal BI instances, open-source scripts, and cloud sandboxes. Far from mere rebellion, these shadow practices reveal institutional shortcomings while delivering tangible gains. Here are seven compelling advantages, viewed through a lens that values both ingenuity and measured reflection.
We asked seven highly engaged professionals for their top advantages of allowing Shadow Apps to thrive. We then requested comments from industry leaders. And here is what they told us.
Continue reading14 Saturday Feb 2026
Tags
Apache Kafka, data architecture, Data Catalog, data governance, data integration, Data Streaming, data-engineering, data-logistics-hub, ETL
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Bandoxa, 15th February 2026
Building the Data Logistics Hub: Pieces and Parts – 2026/02/15 – Part 3
This episode provides a comprehensive framework for the third installment in the series on the Data Logistics Hub (DLH). Martyn Jones conceptualised it as a technology-agnostic, centralised platform. Its purpose is efficiently moving, governing, and distributing data across organisations. This part expands on Part 1 (Challenges and Opportunities) and Part 2 (The Strategy). It focuses on the tangible “pieces and parts” of the DLH architecture. It outlines mandatory and optional elements. The episode also explores potential technologies. It examines key processes such as data pulling or pushing, translation from source to target, mapping, and data catalogues.
Continue reading14 Saturday Feb 2026
Tags
data architecture, data governance, data integration, data management, Data Warehouse, data-engineering, data-logistics-hub, data-strategy, Enterprise Architecture
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Bandoxa, 14th February 2026
Building the Data Logistics Hub: The Strategy – 2026/02/14 – Part 2Before I begin, remember this: “All data roads lead to the Data Logistics Hub.” They also lead from it. It is the Rome of the age of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Be prepared!
Okay, we will now examine the Data Logistics Hub in terms of strategy, execution plans, and roadmaps.
A high-level blueprint for a successful Data Logistics Hub outlines several requirements. These include principles, guiding objectives, an imagined “better world” and organisational alignment. Key trade-offs must also be considered, such as centralised versus federated and batch versus streaming, among others.
Continue reading13 Friday Feb 2026
Posted in Inform, educate and entertain., Love
Tags
data analytics, Data Quality, data science, Data Visualization, data-engineering, Exploratory Data Analysis, Valentine's Day, Welsh Culture
Martyn Rhisiart Jones
Oza-Cesuras, Saturday 14th February 2026
Ah, cariad, let us speak now in the shadowed cadence of the valleys. The voice rolls like the Tawe after rain. It is rich and resonant, a little rough at the edges yet velvet beneath. Burton might have murmured it after one too many whiskies. Or Hopkins in that quiet, measured thunder waits. Patient as stone, it strikes. And through it all, the ghost of Dylan himself weaves words like nets of starlight over Talacharn’s black waters. Gwynfor’s steady, unyielding fire burns low and true for the land. It is more than soil and more than song. It is memory made flesh.
If Data and Information were our Valentine’s sweetheart, she would be fierce and elusive. She would not be some simpering rose but a wild thing of the Welsh hills. She would be ancient and newborn, speaking in cynghanedd of numbers and patterns. Her breath would be the soft hiss of wind through bracken.
We would woo her thus, yn Gymraeg ac yn Saesneg entwined, with the lilt that carries the green pulse of Cymru beneath every syllable:
Continue reading