What Separates This From That?

When we’re not simply driven by price how do we choose what to buy? We tell ourselves a story about quality, design, durability, or provenance. But often as we rationalise about the advantages of one product or service over another, the differentiator we perceive is the degree of love and care that’s gone into making…

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Who Do You Want To Be To Whom?

The key question for all of us, no matter what business we’re in, is who do we want to be to whom? When we lose sight of who we’re in business to serve, and why we lose more than our competitive advantage. We lose the heart and soul of our business.

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When Subjectivity Wins

Successful brands craft and tell stories for their ideal customers—the people who are ready to hear and believe them.The more subjective we can be in our sales and marketing, the better.

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Easy Does It

Our expectations about the quality of products have increased exponentially with our ability to perfect the things we produce. When quality improves our tolerance for mistakes plummets. Interestingly, the same isn’t true for human interactions. Even though digital technology has enabled degrees of efficiency beyond our wildest dreams our expectations about how people will use…

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Big Enough

Conventional business wisdom suggests that success is dependent on achieving scale. We’ve come to equate fulfilling our potential with being number one—having the biggest piece of the pie. In our quest for success, we sometimes forget to question how much pie is enough. Exceeding the optimal amount of pie has consequences. We fail to deliver…

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Ten Things Your Competitors Don’t Do

YOUR COMPETITORS DON’T… 1. Obsess about how their products and services make customers feel. 2. Help people to ‘buy in’ and belong (not just to buy). 3. Make something that’s not for everyone. 4. Question how they could do it better. 5. Listen twice as much as they talk. 6. Do what they say they…

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Why Meaning Is A Competitive Advantage

The day after she turned fourteen, my mum (number ten in a family of eleven), woke early to catch the bus that would take her to work at her first full-time job in a sweet factory. I don’t remember her telling me about how she got the job. It’s likely it happened through word of…

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The Upside Of Ignoring Your Competition

In his memoir Bryan Cranston (the actor who plays Walter White in the cult drama series Breaking Bad), describes a mental shift he made about auditions twenty years ago. He and the other actors would smile politely at each other while they sweated it out waiting for their turn to audition. Every person in the…

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