Paradox of planning & doing.
We all do stuff in business every day, and largely assume that it needs to be done because it is in the budget. In other words, we are making investment decisions at a micro level simply because there is an institutional requirement to consume the resource. Rather...
Tyranny of the urgent.
I kept a diary of how I spent my time recently, and noted a number of things I suspected, but did not have the "data" such as it was. Being "connected" had reduced my productivity significantly. My concentration was broken when emails came in, seemingly demanding just...
Social Media is just the tool.
Like Theodore Levitt's old adage of marketing that people don't buy a drill, they buy a hole, so it is with Social Media. Social media is the tool, it can be used badly, effectively, creatively, and efficiently, like any tool, but it is the impact of the tool, the...
To SM or not to SM
I find myself continually attempting to argue the case for investment in Social Media at the expense of more traditional broadcast and print media. Almost everyone I interact with from my large clients to the local tennis club fail to instinctively understand the full...
A sense of shared purpose.
A small manufacturing business I work with, operating in a domain now dominated by a few huge retailers, and cheap imported products, is facing a dilemma. Three key people are leaving at pretty much the same time, for different reasons, just with difficult...
Encouraging evolution protects against revolution.
Evolution happens in most circumstances in the absence of strong 'anti-evolution" measures, and often even then, generally there is stuff happening at the fringes. However, rigid barriers hold back change, until like the boy in the dyke, you run out of fingers, and...
Digital marketing or marketing in a digital world?
It is all a matter of perspective. Digital marketing implies an application of the existing disciplines of marketing, just tweaked a bit to accommodate the presence in the environment of digital options, facebook, linkedin, Pin it, and the rest. Marketing in a digital...
Politics Vs Organisational dynamics
"Politics" is a dirty corporate word, but "Organisational Dynamics" appears to be OK, and is gaining traction as a cliché. What is the difference? Both describe the process of accumulating the wherewithal to exercise influence, and dictate outcomes. It is a fact of...
Anatomy of a failed sales pitch.
I walked into a retail store last week, the salesperson wandered up, big smile, "How can I help you" he said. Good start, better than the usual "Can I help?" which has as a possible answer, "No thanks, just looking". I told him the product category I was looking for,...
Crowdsourced funding for SME’s.
Blogs, facebook, web sites, and e-books have all bypassed the mass model of publishing, enabling huge numbers of people a creative outlet not available before 2000, but there is still the need for seed-funding. Raising the modest amounts of money to try and...