Things I have learned this week: - London doesn't do hot - a combination of people works wonders for a pitch - distilling big ideas down into consumable parts isn't about using a smaller font - random social media conversations on the train can lead to great things - there again, so can in the … Continue reading Weeknote 250: which feels it should be more significant than it actually is
I was lucky enough yesterday to be invited along to an event organised by the Corporate Research Forum by an old colleague of mine from my leadership training days. The lure, other than a good catch up with Sean, was to hear former Labour party communications head Alastair Campbell speak. Before the event I was … Continue reading Winners
Reflecting on last week's news about Microsoft's strategic direction, one thing stands out at a very base level: three years or so since Microsoft acquired both Yammer and Skype and it still appears that "important" communications are done by email first. That's probably the same for just about every major global organisation, but if the … Continue reading Through internal channels
Things I have learned this week: - it's still all to easy to get sucked into thinking about systems, not thinking about people - and software companies encourage that kind of thing as much as they possibly can - some interesting alignments of ideas yet again from serendipitous meetings - the multi-client juggle has its … Continue reading Weeknote 249: start with purpose
So in the verbose email style it seems so ingrained in the culture of Microsoft, Satya Nadella has announced a new mission statement for the Redmond behemoth - to empower every person and every organisation on the planet to achieve more. A really great mission statement, to my mind, combines four key attributes: aspiration, specificity and tangibility, … Continue reading Mission to nowhere?
I had a fascinating chat with Mark Earls yesterday in the vague sun of Holborn. Towards the end of our broad conversation we got onto the subject of Behavioural Economics, and Mark's frustration that the entire field seems to be dominated by a meme that describes our human ability to shortcut processing (effectively Kahneman's System … Continue reading Cognitive strengths, not bias bugs
There seems to be a repeating narrative about the rise of the robots going on at the moment: from the front page of this month's Harvard Business Review, to Channel 4 prime time drama on Sunday nights, the robots are coming and they're after us, our jobs, our sanity... Now, last time I looked, the most … Continue reading Dumbing down
Things I learned this week: - the challenges of parenthood are myriad, complex and ever-present; most of us have received more training in how to use Powerpoint - the social experience when it comes to buying things is, well, a bit shoddy - (it's also quite fun to turn mundane and annoying things into side … Continue reading Weeknote 248: parenting
How are organisations using social networks to connect to their prospective customers? Well, in the straw-poll experience that I had with companies in the UK domestic telecoms sector yesterday, the answer appears to be "not very well". Over the past few years I have had a series of traumatic experiences when my home broadband and … Continue reading The transparent consumer
Every year I have the same painful set of conversations. Who should I use for my home phone and broadband supply, and how the hell do I work out what it is that they might charge me. So this year, something new. I keep hearing that brands want to have conversations with customers over social … Continue reading Transparent consumerism
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