Of course, the quote is more popularly known as ‘you can’t have your cake and eat it too’ — which, of course, you can. History shows sources for both, and in the context of values, the reverse order ‘you can’t eat your cake and have it too’ makes sense. Because holding your...
The investigation into Australian Leisure and Hospitality (ALH) pokies venues returned yet more damaging details last week. On top of the fact that staff used customers’ personal information to encourage continued gambling, new whistleblower information alleges they also illegally gave free drinks to pokies players to keep them gambling longer, and were instructed on...
Robert Greene’s new book The Laws of Human Nature has a lot to say about the character and the nature of values. He’s talking about individuals. However, it’s easy to see how his observations can also apply to organisations. From Greene’s book: “As we get older life tends to weaken us. Our empathy...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...