Books are one of my very favourite things. Ebooks, audiobooks, good old paper and ink books. They inform me, get me thinking in new ways, inspire more than a few of my blogs and often wind their way into my conversations and presentations. More than one person has walked away...
How often do you deeply align the way you promote what you do and connect with your customers to what you care about? I’m not talking about a quick campaign to piggyback off some Hallmark holiday. I’m talking bone-deep-into-the-details alignment so even if I didn’t really know what you cared about...
“’The hardest thing is to be sincere,’ young André Gide wrote in his journal in 1890, decades before receiving the Nobel Prize…” And so began a recent Brain Pickings.org treatise on the topic of sincerity, which in turn collided with a raft of other articles and posts I’ve seen recently on that old...
In the past, my last article for the year has been “The Good, the Brand and the Ugly” but this year I thought I’d take another approach. Because while there is plenty of brand good I can praise and no shortage of brand ugly to be lampooned, this year I’d like...
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...
In 1884, Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote a book called Flatland. I’ve always loved the analogy of that book and recently was reminded of it during a RadioLab podcast. Nothing is more dangerous to a business or a brand than stagnant thinking or being mired in the same whats and hows forever. In...
When you do everything at once you never know what is working or what is not. I was reminded of this again the other day on my yoga mat as I shifted around in my pose moving my foot, spreading my shoulders, pulling up my knees … you get the idea....
The Virgin Unite Blog had a piece this week asking what’s the best advice you’ve ever received? It’s a pretty good question. Over the years I’ve had plenty of advice, sometimes welcome and sometimes not-so welcome (that somehow often turns out to be the best stuff). One piece of advice has stayed with...
From the moment his fateful words were captured on video and shared around there has been no shortage of commentary and hand-wringing about the Alan Jones thing. To date I have resisted entering the fray save a few tweets here and there, mostly because I wasn’t sure what I wanted...
There’s a change in the wind. Several articles in the past couple of weeks have called outright that there needs to be a brand rethink. I couldn’t agree more! Both were in Fast Company magazine. I’ve been highly critical of the way the “marketing approach” to brand is applied in many organisations – even...