“Where does the individual end and the organisation start?” A version of this question was asked last week by a group working on a new business, and there’s nothing like a good question to get my thoughts churning. I’ll start with the individual. Everyone has a brand, even if you’ve never thought...
Alignment is a central part of how you build a brand, and I always expound the value of making sure this and that work together to achieve the same end. But it only does so much and needs another element to push the kind of deep work that is present in great...
Just being different is all a bit ho-hum. Different isn’t even all that hard. Change a couple of things, and you’re different. Me being in this location, and you being in that location means you have something that makes you different. My prices are low, and your prices are high. Yep, different....
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...
Over the years I’ve seen organisation after organisation tie themselves up in knots over words. In absence of a genuine understanding of what they want to say, messages are subjected to endless wordsmithing, copy by consensus and all manner of other assaults on language and meaning. From purpose statements, to core...
A lot of my articles intersect with Leadership for a simple reason. I quite simply have never seen an organisation with a strong and resilient brand result if it is not driven and supported by the leadership of the organisation. And when I say leadership, I mean literally the chief executive, general...
People grow and mature over time. But while some behaviours and personality attributes may modify, essential things about us seem to remain mostly unchanged. Author Susan Cain has become the voice of the introverted everywhere thanks to her book Quiet, and in a recent article she tackled the question: “Is it possible for my personality...
During a podcast, author Tim Ferris and Josh Waitzkin, who was the basis for the book Searching for Bobby Fischer, were discussing the necessity of bringing discipline and alignment around the things that you believe.It’s been an emerging theme these past few articles, from last week’s entreaty to not forget...
I was interviewed last year for an ABC News story about the new questions around the VW braking issues that are being raised in light of the emissions cheating scandal. The show aired last Sunday night and the next day I sent out a quick tweet noting that part of the interview...
Google unveiled their new logo a couple of weeks ago and the world gave a collective yawn. Not so much a new anything as an update of the typeface of their current logo. And while in the hype driven media landscape anything that is not a revolution is seen as a...