In 2016 Colin Kaepernick, a football player with the NFL, used his profile as a quarterback to take a stand and protest police brutality against African-Americans and other minorities. Instead of standing during the National Anthem, he ‘took a knee‘. The gesture reverberated throughout the league with others joining his action...
The term ‘brand’ gets bandied about like a lazy de facto term for the organisation. However, a ‘brand’ doesn’t do anything. A brand is a result of the work the whole organisation does, and while marketing gets most of the love, the everyday effort of other areas and tasks go comparatively...
How many times have you looked at an issue or problem solely from a single perspective? I was flipping through the July edition of Wallpaper magazine recently as I waited for the person I was meeting to arrive and discovered a series by photographer Barbara Probst that showed the same subject...
I’ve never understood the phrase “we live our values”. A value is how you do things — it underpins behaviour. Almost by definition, it is something you live. If there’s stuff you call values that don’t fit that definition, they aren’t values. I know people say it to draw a line between the...
The plastic bag fiasco of Coles and Woolworths provides lessons worthy of a business school case study. There are lessons to be learned here about how to communicate and implement change, how to support staff, how to align commercial and social interests, and how to plan programs so they don’t...
No one cares what your name is. Well, perhaps your family and close friends might have a thought or two — but out in the world at large, nope. Some 25 years ago I decided to work for myself, and immediately became fixated on what the name of my business should be....
Where do we want to go next year, in three years, five years, 10 years? Thinking about the imagined future captures a chunk of an organisation’s focus. Instead, however, we should consider what might be learned from shifting some of this focus to ‘what is’? ‘Well, that’s no fun’, I hear...
My Linkedin comment said: “How to use purpose is hugely unexplored territory. As you note the warm fuzzy aspect is well-covered. Less well understood and discussed is the work of bringing purpose into the messy and unheroic day-to-day work of organisations. Without that work, purpose has little chance of becoming a...
In today’s overhyped purpose climate, where the question ‘why?’ reverberates through the hallways of company offices everywhere, the question of who should carry the mantle of ‘chief purpose officer’ is an open one. Scant agreement exists on the best approach; there’s the knee-jerk default of the chief executive officer, a newly...
“Culture fit is a recipe for groupthink—it weeds out diversity of thought.” Psychologist, Wharton Professor and author Adam Grant posted the above quote on LinkedIn last week. I think it depends on your workplace culture. What is culture? My definition: what we value and how we are together. Grant’s post continued: “Hire, reward, and promote cultural...