You know the power of compounding. When you reinvest the interest on your investment, your return grows over time. Atomic Habits author James Clear discussed compound return of 1% habits at his Growth Faculty event in Melbourne this week. Describing how a daily 1% improvement in a habit will compound to...
When PwC consultants decided to share confidential government tax policy with other clients, they shredded their promises, mocked their values and landed PwC in the crosshairs of the federal police. Breaking promises always has consequences. But it rarely lands the promiser at the top of the news cycle. PwC is there because...
When a brand’s store of value overflows, there’s usually an undercurrent of I care about what you care about going on between me and you. It shows up in both the promises made and agreed upon.Within those same promises is a contract called ‘what we owe each other’. In his...
A night spent on a cold, hard terminal floor in Dallas wasn’t a part of the trip to Sydney that 300 Qantas passengers expected. Frustrated, they tweeted: “There was a mechanical fault with the plane which of course needs to be addressed (!!) but there is apparently *no other plane* and *no...
The continuing effort to keep values in balance tempts many organisations to measure and manage them in people’s performance and behaviours. Judging whether they’re holding the value or not.But there is a different way to keep values on track, so they contribute to the brand. One that allows for their...
Values aren’t on or off. It’s more of a slippery slope kind of thing. And while people expend untold efforts labelling what a value is, scant attention gets paid to what it isn’t and even less to when it goes too far.My recent articles have explored values, culture and brand....
Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle’s golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension.Look under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this place sucks” hostility.You can most commonly find my kind of...
Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more worthy and useful question.I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about laundry lists of behaviours for doing this...
Organisations are made of unheroic work — those thousands of everyday actions and decisions that keep your particular engine turning. Hidden and often unexamined, it is the lion-share of what people do in their jobs.I call the gap between what you say is most important and how people do that...
You know the page. There might even be one in your organisation. At the top is purpose, and from there, the cascade continues…PurposeVisionMissionCore ValuesStrategic pillarsBrand promiseBrand valuesEssencePersonalityExperience principlesPositioningEtc. I frequently see organisations that have the entire shebang including some I haven’t even listed. It’s madness. No one can hold all of...