Several years ago, I was on a long-haul flight back from the far east. I found myself sitting next to one of the senior executives from a leading strategic consultancy. This executive was on the way back from advising one of the world’s top commercial banks on corporate strategy.

At the time, I was heading up Technical Design, Enterprise Architecture and IT Strategy for the world-renowned architecture practice Foster + Partners and was leading a rather complex process of creating a comprehensive IT Strategy for the Practice.