So you’ve found your purpose. Finished with the workshops, hand-wringing and arguments over words, you can now take a breath. Right? Wrong. Now the actual work begins. Absent in the never-ending clarion call to purpose is the reality of what it takes to use it. Sure there is the occasional plea to...
Once you’ve established the foundation of identity (purpose and values) you’re all good right? Wrong. Now the work begins. Every day something will come up to test how much you care about and believe your purpose and those values. There’s a daily battle for your brand going on inside your organisation. Even the...
If you’re like the person I was talking to last week, you spend many hours speculating things that can go wrong. Okay well, maybe not hours, but at least somewhere throughout the planning process, the thorny question of ‘what if X bad thing happens?’ will pop above the parapets. Lots of...
While Wellington recovered from the previous week’s earthquake amidst a few aftershocks here and there, a stalwart group of souls gathered to listen to people talk about their customer experience adventures at the Customer Experience Excellence NZ conference. I was the chairperson for the group and lots of great blog fodder...
It takes courage to tell the other story – the one where things didn’t go as planned – and to share the hard lessons you’ve learned with others. A few months ago I received an email from Luke Taylor with just that kind of story about his company TPC. I...
The old “what’s best practice” chestnut has been rearing its ugly head a lot lately. I get it, in the absence of any idea of how something could be done, looking at what others who are successful are doing can seem like a pretty good place to start. The key...
The focus is all to often at the edges. Why are we here? What are we going to do, deliver, say and be? The “how” in the middle gets scant attention by comparison. Of course it doesn’t get totally missed or “what” would never happen. The “how” that gets missed is...
Delight. A noun meaning a high degree of enjoyment or pleasure. Joy. Rapture. If there’s a word that deserves a place on the over-exposed list of business lingo, delight would have to be up there. It is most commonly used in combination with customer, as in ‘customer delight’. A quick Google search...
Unexpectedly and delightfully I ran into my friend @AJKulatunga yesterday. We always have great conversations and this one quickly ranged into the uncomfortable necessity of discipline in successful businesses. Discipline is a fairly unsexy concept bringing to mind images of soldiers on the drill field and the early morning training grind...
I’ve written previously about the importance and value of culture to the business and the brand. And often that unintentionally leads down the path of it being more important than other things. There’s a good article on Fast Company that illustrates why that isn’t so. Bob Frisch makes the case that “Culture...