Consider any company that’s been around for a decades or more. They will have shifted products and how they sell them. Perhaps at some point they used a different name or logo, discontinued a product, moved locations, shifted to web only. They might have changed manufacturers, been acquired by a...
As value accumulates or erodes in a brand, what and how you do things change. Is value building nicely? Do more of those things. That’s change. Eroding like the beach at high tide, stop or switch things around. Also change. Those changes with a small c happen endlessly and usually unnoticed....
Habits and rituals can look similar. They’re not, and I’ve focused on the habit side of things for too long. That changed when I read The Ritual Effect by Professor Michael Norton. Norton says, “One automates, the other animates”. Elaborating that “Habit is the what. It’s something we do. … We...
Once you know what your values mean, you can begin the climb to mastery. Still, the gap between the bottom two layers of the pyramid and the top three is akin to calling the Grand Canyon a ditch. The chasm is so rarely bridged because it takes concerted discipline and consistent effort. These...
The famous 19th-century fable says a frog in boiling water will jump out. However, when put in tepid water that slowly increases in temperature, the frog will not notice the change and will die. Spoiler. It’s not true. A frog placed in boiling water will die immediately, and when cooler water...
The word steppe comes from 15th-century Russia and means ‘further origin uncertain’, which neatly captures the nature of values. While they’re often presented as fully formed imperatives. They’re not. It’s an ongoing process to find them, understand them and use them to guide choices every day. But first. Vast and often...
This started as a different article about the elements that make up an experience. But after rumbling them and examining what organisations do and don’t control, I realised the details are less important than how they turn into value. Which led me back to promises. In the hands of organisations, experience is...
Nearly every week I see yet another story about a company embarking on a 'rebrand'. Accompanying the hype is a rush to discard what got them here in an attempt to downplay or erase the past. Which is a common symptom of how people try to change a brand. It’s a...
Wading through Barbra Streisand’s exhaustive 900-plus page biography, My Name is Barbra, I didn’t expect to stumble upon a lesson in maturity that applies to organisations and how their brands store value. In chapter seven, Streisand recounts her audition for the movie Funny Girl. She was trying to convince the director that...
While enjoying a coffee with a friend, she shared a story about her workplace, which got me pondering the culture-process divide and the consequences for people’s endeavours. Culture is how people choose to do things repeatedly, and processes direct people on how to do it. And when those two things are...