A request lands in Tom’s inbox: ‘Hi, I’d like to connect with you.’ He gets a few every week, and after a quick look at the person’s profile he clicks accept and doesn’t think much more about it. A few days later emails start appearing from a company he’s never heard...
In art class, Maybelle prepared to present her work. The class project was to design a poster so people would take action. The story continues in Chip Kidd’s book The Cheese Monkeys: “Maybelle walked to the front of the room … up went her poster. She’d had it printed by a local...
The plastic bag fiasco of Coles and Woolworths provides lessons worthy of a business school case study. There are lessons to be learned here about how to communicate and implement change, how to support staff, how to align commercial and social interests, and how to plan programs so they don’t...
It’s 9am on a Tuesday and gathered around the table is a smattering of people from executive and management ranks with one task: come up with the purpose statement. The scene plays out thousands of times a day across all kinds of organisations with varying degrees of success. And for...
After a recent flight, and before I’d even completed my return home, there it was in my inbox. The survey, so I can tell the airline how they can “keep improving”. It also happens with the hotel, or the homewares online store, or the public bathroom. It seems everyone wants me to...
After I wrote about personal brand a few weeks ago, I received an email asking me to extend that thinking to include how to find your message. Finding a clear and straightforward way to talk about what you do and care about is hard. And today, a lot of people have more...
Describing what you care about without descending into hyperbole is hard because fear sits underneath the words people use. Fear that my thing is not good enough, sexy enough, bold enough, game-changing enough. And we’re good at using language to mask our fear. Hype is subtle at first. Just give the...
As more of our interactions become digital, the desire to translate them into a relationship is creating a faux familiarity that bugs me. Acknowledge me, yes, but too often it slips over the line into something less appropriate. Tone is a tricky thing, and the gap between formal and familiar can...
It is amazing how such an intangible element such as trust can be nurtured by a thoroughly tangible means – all for the greater good of your business. How does information circulate through your organisation? If you are like most, the actual flow has very little in common with the hierarchy...
The world really doesn’t need another kind of statement. Or does it? Hijacked by the “do good” police, purpose today is wielded like a weapon. Coupled with the tepid consensus-driven visions and missions of corporates, these statements breed cynicism and lead me to think it’s time for a different kind of...