Winning Wars With Agile: Fear and Loathing – Revisited

13 Fri Mar 2026

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Martyn Rhisiart Jones

“Logistics is all of war-making, except shooting the guns, releasing the bombs, and firing the torpedoes.”

ADM Lynde D. McCormick, USN

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Córdoba, 3rd October 2024

Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Marid, Friday 13th March 2026

In the boardrooms of Silicon Valley and the corridors of Whitehall, the gospel of agility has become a mantra for efficiency and innovation. Borrowed from the frenetic world of software development, where iterative sprints and self-organising teams promise to outpace lumbering bureaucracies, agile methodologies, scaled up through frameworks like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), are now touted as universal elixirs. But can these principles, honed in the digital realm, truly orchestrate the chaos of armed conflict? Or do they risk injecting perilous uncertainty into arenas where hesitation can spell catastrophe? This question, once a provocative thought experiment, gains urgency amid evolving threats, from hybrid warfare in Eastern Europe to cyber skirmishes in the South China Sea. Drawing on historical precedents, contemporary military adaptations, and a dash of Celtic scepticism, we dissect whether agility’s allure holds water on the front lines, echoing the resilient pragmatism of Welsh soldiery through the ages.

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IT’S POLITICS: Leaders Who Shape Global Conflict: Trump and Xi

12 Thu Mar 2026

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Martyn Rhisiart Jones, Madrid 12th March 2026

We asked some of our clients, bespoke AI and our Strategy Team: Who is the political leader most likely to cause World War III, and who is the political leader most capable of stopping World War III?

And this was the response:

Viewed through the prism of strategic history and contemporary financial diplomacy, the question of which leader might inadvertently ignite, or instead forestall, a wider conflagration is less a matter of personality than of structural power, institutional constraints, and geopolitical incentives. Yet, as historians from Thucydides to modern analysts have repeatedly noted, individual leaders can still accelerate or dampen systemic pressures. With that caveat, recent expert commentary, polling data and geopolitical assessments as of March 2026 suggest two figures loom particularly large in opposite directions: Donald Trump, the incumbent president of the United States, and Xi Jinping, China’s paramount leader.

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IT’S POLITICS: The Guilty Men – 2026/03/12

12 Thu Mar 2026

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Today’s view of the political landscape from GoodStrat.com.

Madrid, 12th March 2026.

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PART ONE

Based on current events as of March 2026, compiling a comprehensive, global list of politicians under suspicion of breaking laws requires noting that “suspicion” often stems from ongoing investigations, indictments, or international warrants rather than convictions. These cases span corruption, war crimes, interference with law enforcement, and more. I’ve prioritised by prominence (e.g., heads of state first), severity of allegations (e.g., international crimes over domestic probes), and recency/impact. Note that many U.S. cases involve investigations by the Department of Justice under the Trump administration, which critics have described as politically motivated. This is not an exhaustive list, as investigations can evolve rapidly.

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IT’S POLITICS: The Aferlife Briefing- 2026/03/11

11 Wed Mar 2026

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THE AFTERLIFE BRIEFING

(formerly titled The Saturday Scene*)*

Tagline:
Where history’s most troublesome minds return to review the week’s political disasters.

OPENING

Studio lights rise. Dramatic music that sounds suspiciously like a funeral march remixed for television.

Martyn Rhisiart Jones sits behind a polished desk.

Behind him, a giant screen flashes headlines:

WAR, SANCTIONS, DIPLOMACY, OUTRAGE, DENIAL

Seven historical figures sit around a circular table.

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Laughing @ Data.Com: A Satirical Take on IT Industry Hype – Book Review

10 Tue Mar 2026

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Penelope Parker, Madrid 10th March 2026

The tech industry has long been a parade of expensive suits, hollow acronyms, and “digital transformations” that possess all the structural integrity of a damp Digestive biscuit. Into this landscape of algorithmic overpromise and professionalised grifting comes Martyn Jones with Laughing @ Data.Com, a book that, by all rights, should be required reading for anyone currently being held hostage by a Jira ticket.

Jones, a man once heralded as a top-tier database expert back “when that kind of accolade still meant something,” has produced a work that is less a technical manual and more a weary, satirical travelogue through the “Kafkaesque scrum of buzzwords and bootlickers” that defines modern IT.

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Laughing@Data.Com: A Candid Review of Data’s Absurdities – Book Review

10 Tue Mar 2026

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Rebecca Trentt

Book Review: Laughing@Data.Com by Martyn Jones
A survival manual for the data-industrial complex, delivered with a raised eyebrow and a sharpened knife

There are books about data. Then there are books written by people who have survived data.

Laughing@Data.Com sits firmly in the second category.

Martyn Jones’ latest contribution to the already groaning shelf of “data thought leadership” arrives like a heckler in a TED Talk. Where most books on artificial intelligence, analytics, and “digital transformation” read like a PowerPoint deck translated into prose, Jones offers something rarer: a long, irreverent laugh at the entire enterprise.

Not a joyful laugh, mind you. More the hollow, existential chuckle of someone who has spent thirty years watching corporations spend millions trying to discover that spreadsheets still work.

And that, in many ways, is the point.

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Laughing@Data.Com: Hilarious Heresy Against the Hype Machine – Book Review

09 Mon Mar 2026

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Lila de Alba

In the digital colosseum where data evangelists duel with dashboards and AI prophets peddle predictive panaceas, Martyn Jones arrives not with a sword, but a seltzer bottle. His latest tome, Laughing@Data.Com (self-published, 2025), is a riotous romp through the absurdities of the IT industry, a book that skewers the sacred cows of big data, machine learning, and that perennial favorite, “digital transformation,” with the precision of a Welsh coal miner’s pickaxe. Jones, a grizzled data architect who’s consulted for everyone from Adidas to the UN (and survived to tell the tale), channels the spirit of Swiftian satire into a manifesto that’s equal parts Wired’s gadget glee, CIO’s boardroom battle cry, and FT Weekend’s urbane eyebrow-raise. If Dave Trott’s advertising yarns met Stewart Lee’s stand-up scorn in a Zurich banker’s lounge, this would be the offspring: witty, worldly, and wonderfully wicked.

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Revealing Wealth: A Blueprint for Financial Transparency – Book Review

08 Sun Mar 2026

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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.

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