When organisations think about capital, two dominate. Financial and human. Both are crucial, and abusing them will collapse value and drive you out of business. Yet, you accumulate value across more than those two. But don't necessarily consider those things as capitals when making decisions. As a result, choices erode rather...
"Instead of bringing back 1600 plants, we might return from our journeys with a collection of small unfêted but life-enhancing thoughts." Alain de Botton Travel always reveals… something. A recent trip reminded me of the importance of getting the essential things right. No matter what your business does. There is one thing that is...
You know the power of compounding. When you reinvest the interest on your investment, your return grows over time. Atomic Habits author James Clear discussed compound return of 1% habits at his Growth Faculty event in Melbourne this week. Describing how a daily 1% improvement in a habit will compound to...
Do this.Start that.Add another idea.Layer a different process.All around is the quest for more. Bigger, different, shiny things to transport whatever you're doing to the next level or a new place.But is more the answer?Try this.Do less. Scale back and instead inspect what's happening now for places you can stop...
Buried in the PR about renaming French Connection (popularly known as FCUK) Australia, distribution group Brandbank CEO Peter Halkett says, “Now is the time to discontinue the Australian distribution deal”. But he stresses, “French Connection may continue in Australia through another distribution network”.Say what.So they are taking a shell, previously...
You have a culture if your organisation is over a few days old. It’s made of how you do things and is rooted in values. It’s also in flux. Every person you hire and fire, office you open and close, market you enter or exit shapes activity and know-how. I’ve previously written...
It’s 1990, and a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton is using a game to test how people communicate. She’s assigned students roles of ‘tappers’ and ‘listeners’ and asked the tappers to pick a well-known song and tap the song on a table. Next, the listeners have to...
“And then we started the brand work“, said the CEO while I listened to her talk about the behind-the-scenes effort to reimagine their product. Then, later the same week, I received another company’s business plan. A comment hidden in the notes for one area said, “Brand doesn’t play a part in...
Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle’s golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension.Look under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this place sucks” hostility.You can most commonly find my kind of...
Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more worthy and useful question.I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about laundry lists of behaviours for doing this...
