Blog
Brand Strategy for Professional Services Can Be Emotive
Professional services, like law firms, would do well to move beyond the rudimentary basics of branding such as identities, symbols, and colors, according to a blog post on Forbes.com. We couldn’t agree more. Like all businesses, professional firms face a challenging future with hyper-competition, commoditized knowledge, and accelerating change all looming on the horizon. These firms clearly need to get fit for the future – and their preparedness plan needs to include a major tune-up for their brands. However, we believe professional firms need to also leapfrog over the traditionally...
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Exactly How Does Your Brand Make People Feel?
Every minute of every day your brand’s future is influenced – for better or worse – by the way people feel after experiencing your brand’s way of doing business. Ask yourself, “What is driving the intent, attitude and manner of the way our brand does business right now?” Or, more to the point, “How do we want to leave people feeling as a result of dealing with our brand? Oddly, despite all the innovation and advances in the branding process, few brand-owners have a clear vision for the emotional connection they could seek that could transform their...
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Must Read: David Grey’s “Connected Company”
High on our upcoming Holiday reading list is “The Connected Company” by David Grey. We’re adding it to our list because we came across an interesting #HRBBookChat Twitter stream in which David held court. These chat extracts, some from David, others from readers, provoked our interest: “You’re in a connected company when everyone feels connection between the job they do and the purpose of the company.” “Leaders need to build relationships and trust, it is always a work in progress, never done in my mind.” “HR must help them connect their...
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Leaders That Matter Look Outward
One of the biggest challenges for any leader is to maintain a holistic perspective of the world. Too often, the pressures of the market, of shareholders, and the organization, keep the leader looking inward. This inward-looking behavior extends to the rest of the organization, because people “follow the leader”. As a result, the organization continues to spiral down into egocentric, myopic and self-serving behavior. Unfortunately, this self-serving attitude, and way of being, puts the organization in the class of “most” businesses, and therefore, dilutes whatever...
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From Feisty Startup to Agile Industry Player
You’re off and running. You have a big idea, funding is lining up, and you’re ready to take the world by storm. Stop for a moment. Think. What is behind your big idea? What will help you build a business case that’s right for the times? What will cause the industry’s most valuable people to come knocking on your door? What will help you attract the team that can truly make your product matter to people? What will raise your idea from just another thing to buy to something people buy into in a serious way? What will help you create a thriving, agile, and sustainable...
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Is Your Business “The Greatest Story Never Yold?” Time to Get Talking!
“Close Enough for Love” is a Tony Bennett classic. In the lyrics, there’s the phrase “the greatest story never told.” Based on our experience working with clients, we believe there are thousands of companies out there sitting on a very valuable asset. This is an asset that could generate new revenues, build customer loyalty, enthuse and motivate your workforce, raise your business above the crowd, and make you a hero. The asset is a meaningful story about your business that’s waiting to be told. – It’s a story based on meaningful truths about...
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“I’m Not a Human Resource. I’m a Human Being.” – Engagement for Success
Engage for Success is a UK-based movement committed to the idea that there is a better way to work, a better way to enable personal growth, organisational growth and ultimately growth for Britain by releasing more of the capability and potential of people at work. They recently launched this thought-provoking video: Learn more here. Read our paper, The Meaningful...
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You May Call it a Business Strategy But, Delivered Correctly, your People Will Call it a Gift.
As business leaders, we often use words we’d never say to our loved ones. For example, we’d never ask someone we love to “implement a three-point strategy”, or to “capture insights, view them through the right lens, and cascade them to the rest of the family.” We know that if we talked that way to the people we really care about, they would stare at us with baffled looks, smile blandly, and ignore us for the rest of the day. Yet, all too often, that’s how we talk to our employees when we seek to “engage” them. And they look at us with...
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Connected TVs: What Do They Allow People to Do?
Connected TVs In our first post, we introduced you to revolution with two dimensions. First, technology is changing what TVs can do. Second, people are changing their behavior with respect to TV. Here, we continue to explore how this revolution challenges brand managers. Today’s applications and services on internet-connected TVs are what we can call “first generation.” By first generation we mean standalone services, which are accessed by the television viewer through a menu of “internet services.” In some cases, the manufacturer has provided a dedicated button on the remote control for...
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Leadership in a Time of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity
We’ve often referred to Stowe Boyd and his musings. Awhile back, we referenced the implications of social business networking based on Stowe Boyd’s presentation on “Postnormal Business”. Let’s now explore the four drivers of the Postnormal era: the VUCA syndrome. Volatility – Things are moving, evolving, changing, and disappearing faster and faster all the time. Uncertainty – It’s harder to predict what is coming, what to do, and what the results will be. Complexity – The business world is becoming far more complex, media is highly...
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Meaningful Businesses Use Meaningful Language
As the cartoonist Hugh McLeod puts it, “I don’t get it: People who hope to be successful by offering the same crap as everybody else, who hope to be successful by offering the SAME LANGUAGE as everybody else.” All too often, all the companies competing in a category use the same language to describe their products and the benefits they offer. That is, until one company stands out and starts striving to matter to people by approaching them on a meaningful level. A key part of our consulting service is providing clients with ways to behave in order to become more meaningful to...
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Business as Iguanas – Further Support For the Widening Meaning Gap
In our paper, “The Meaning Gap – What It Means to Your Business”, we contend that business and people are moving in opposite directions. We are halfway through Dev Patnaik’s brilliant book, “Wired to Care”, and have enjoyed learning more about how our brains work with respect to feeling empathy for others. He describes how our reptilian brain gets us to do stuff, like turn the page of his book. The neocortex, 80% of the human brain, gives us the power of high-level thinking, so we can figure out what Dev is talking about. In between these two is the limbic...
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Are You Brave Enough to Take a Leap That Matters?
As a business leader, you’ve demonstrated that you possess many valuable skills. But how do you rank on the bravery scale? For example, how willing are you to… …let go of “business as usual”? …be an industry pioneer? …take a leap of faith? At the same time, how eager are you to… …run a company that does well by doing good? …be seen as a leader who matters? …establish yourself as a leader people follow willfully? We’re in the business of helping our clients take a very brave step. This is an important step toward…...
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Meaning Conference 2012: Seven Key Insights for Businesses That Matter
Our Director of Meaningful Insights, Jerry Holtaway, attended “Meaning Conference 2012: Better Business in the 21st Century” in Brighton, UK on October 1. Here, he shares his most significant takeaways from the day’s session. “The word ‘business’ is toxic, and business practice in the main is toxic.” Will McInnes, MD of NixonMcInness and host of the conference, started off the session boldly declaring the trouble business finds itself in as we move into the 21st Century. And while your business may not be clearly “toxic”, it nonetheless depends on people who...
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Meaning Has a Direct Impact on Business
If your business isn’t doing as well as you think it could – and should – then it’s time to consider the reasons why. Why aren’t people doing all the things you need them to do? Why are they resisting your attempts to change the way they think and act? What are people looking for that you aren’t supplying? There’s a sea of change in the way people feel about the decisions they make. They no longer simply act out of greed, capriciousness, and the need for thrills. They pause. They reflect. They consider. They ask themselves: “What is the impact...
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