When PwC consultants decided to share confidential government tax policy with other clients, they shredded their promises, mocked their values and landed PwC in the crosshairs of the federal police. Breaking promises always has consequences. But it rarely lands the promiser at the top of the news cycle. PwC is there because...
Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, is on her way to jail. Sam Bankman Fried lives back at mum and dad’s with an ankle monitor for company while he waits for his trial. And more than a smattering of others are under indictment, headed to jail or kicked out...
The best time to start was a year ago. The second-best time is now. Of course, I'm paraphrasing the famous Chinese proverb about planting trees. But the sentiment is true whether you're talking trees, reading more, drinking less or adding value to your brand.So, start doing these simple things today...
A night spent on a cold, hard terminal floor in Dallas wasn’t a part of the trip to Sydney that 300 Qantas passengers expected. Frustrated, they tweeted: “There was a mechanical fault with the plane which of course needs to be addressed (!!) but there is apparently *no other plane* and *no...
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...
Values aren’t on or off. It’s more of a slippery slope kind of thing. And while people expend untold efforts labelling what a value is, scant attention gets paid to what it isn’t and even less to when it goes too far.My recent articles have explored values, culture and brand....
“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...
When an organisation puts a ‘fun place to work’ in their values, they often mean a games room, funky furniture and kombucha on tap. Not how they carry out the unheroic work living beneath the trappings.The Play Ethic author Pat Kane says play “Helps release thoughts that are locked in...