A request lands in Tom’s inbox: ‘Hi, I’d like to connect with you.’ He gets a few every week, and after a quick look at the person’s profile he clicks accept and doesn’t think much more about it. A few days later emails start appearing from a company he’s never heard...
Purpose has been around for generations, even if it wasn’t explicitly called that. Nor is the purpose anything anyone outside the organisation should get to judge. (The problems created when purpose gets used as a kind of meta-marketing tool is a whole other article.) But judge it they do, leading to...
This past weekend I joined 200 people at a talk by poet and philosopher David Whyte. During his masterful mining of the nooks and crannies of our shared human experience, he recited some of his poems. As I listened, his work “Start Close In” revealed a poetic instruction manual for organisations...
I’m always on the lookout for books to add to my reading list. It’s particularly nice when that reading connects with the enduring question about how to achieve a brand result. One such book is Deep Work by Cal Newport. And while the headline gives away the link between the two things,...
Customer experience (and it’s more recent bedfellow employee experience) often suffer from a buffet approach. And rather than speeding up improvement, the all-you-can-eat mentality often dooms well-intentioned efforts to a bloated waddle. The process most-often begins with an enthusiastic sprint across every stage of the experience and ends with a kind...
If you want to shift a culture, then fire everyone and hire different people who care about what you care about. Of course, that’s not practical at any scale. Author and former foreign policy adviser to President Obama, Ben Rhodes, articulates it more eloquently in his book The World As It...
The organisation and the brand are related, but they are different. You may think I’m splitting hairs, after all, using ‘brand’ as a de facto when talking about a company has become commonplace. To paraphrase the line “the economy, stupid” coined during the 1992 election by Clinton’s campaign strategist: ‘it’s the...
An organisation’s brand is a result. But what are the elements that contribute to the achievement and how do they relate to each other? These are the questions I explore every week in my writing and every day in my thinking. So, I developed a formula to answer to them. Numerous...
When organisations go through sustained tough times, as night follows day, a new logo will often follow. And with a splashy launch Uber is the latest member of the cult of shiny objects. Although with their last rework just three years ago, this is their second trip. Generally speaking, people don’t think organisations...
In art class, Maybelle prepared to present her work. The class project was to design a poster so people would take action. The story continues in Chip Kidd’s book The Cheese Monkeys: “Maybelle walked to the front of the room … up went her poster. She’d had it printed by a local...