During a recent lengthy morning commute, I listened to the Knowledge Project podcast, where host Shane Parrish interviewed Aaron Dignan. Aaron’s a coach and author of Brave New Work. There were a lot of good insights, and one in particular grabbed my attention.They were talking about how misusing compliance undermines...
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....
A time-honoured tradition of beleaguered and reviled organisations the world over is a name change in the vain hope people will mistake them for someone else. And so jest and more than a few jeers met the news last week that Adani Mining was changing its name to Bravus Mining and...
If you want to shift a culture, then fire everyone and hire different people who care about what you care about. Of course, that’s not practical at any scale. Author and former foreign policy adviser to President Obama, Ben Rhodes, articulates it more eloquently in his book The World As It...
When organisations go through sustained tough times, as night follows day, a new logo will often follow. And with a splashy launch Uber is the latest member of the cult of shiny objects. Although with their last rework just three years ago, this is their second trip. Generally speaking, people don’t think organisations...
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...
While listening to the Reboot podcast, I heard a super definition of resilience. Jerry Colonna described it as “the capacity to recover when punched in the face”. It builds on the well-known quote from boxer Mike Tyson: “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. Can your brand result...
The opportunity to innovate takes different paths. And while any direction must be grounded in organisational identity, the fork in the road is usually signposted revolution this way, incremental status quo that way. But as summarised in a recent Knowledge@Wharton article about David Robertson’s book The Power of Little Ideas, there is...
The idea that you can change a brand by changing a name and logo returned to the headlines last week (did it ever really go away?), with the ‘Big Australian’, BHP, the latest company to peddle the myth, dropping the Billiton and updating its logo. The new veneer makes for a...
So things are going pretty well at your business. People love what you’re doing. And you’re having trouble finding enough of the right people to keep up with demand. It’s all good. So why aren’t things running as smoothly as they used to? “It’s just growing pains”, you tell yourself. And while...