I’ve been a casual student of Stoic philosophy for many years and in particular of the slave philosopher Epictetus. I was first introduced to Epictetus when reading Admiral Jim Stockdale’s memoir In Love and War about his time in captivity during the Vietnam War. Admiral Stockdale is a well-known figure in military and...
It all began standing on the railway station platform helplessly watching the train with my favourite scarf still on board, head down at the tracks. Annoyed with myself for being careless I headed home resigned to a winter without the snuggly warmth I’ve come to love. A call into the lost...
For years now I’ve been using the example of terms and conditions when I talk to organisations about customer experience issues. It’s a great illustration of how organisations somehow expect their customers to be a different kind of people than they are themselves. When was the last time you read a...
For a number of weeks now I’ve been recommending the book The Score Takes Care of Itself by the late Bill Walsh and Steve Jamison. While it’s predominantly a leadership book, I can’t think of one thing that has a bigger impact on building a strong, resilient brand than the leadership of...
What do an author, a highly decorated Navy Seal and building brands have in common? While listening to Four Hour Work Week author Tim Ferris’ long form podcast with retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink a point they were discussing jumped out at me – extreme ownership. (I won’t transcript the exchange here but if you go to...
A brand requires a steady balanced diet of thought and action, interaction and reaction, constantly feeding the result. What often happens instead, are hits of creative endeavor that get the organisation hooked on the idea that this is how the brand is built. Like the sugar or caffeine junkies who can’t...
This is probably the 10,001th article on the topic of jargon-laden, by-committee, not-worth-the-paper-they-are-written-on, vision statements. Which begs the question: if everyone knows that too many vision statements are rubbish, why do people keep writing them like that? And why do the legion of consultants who are often in the mix aid...
Who are the right people for your organisation? Beyond the basic skills they need to do the job, how do you decide if the person in front of you will be a good addition to your team and help to build the brand? Plenty has been written about the inter-dependency of...
Delight. A noun meaning a high degree of enjoyment or pleasure. Joy. Rapture. If there’s a word that deserves a place on the over-exposed list of business lingo, delight would have to be up there. It is most commonly used in combination with customer, as in ‘customer delight’. A quick Google search...
“Don’t think of an elephant.” I’m not sure the exact origins of that phrase but I first became away of it via George Lakoff’s book of the same name, and a story in Chip Kidd’s book Cheese Monkeys. My take on the meaning is once you think about one of those lumbering grey pachyderms it...