Don’t Manipulate Me, Move Me

There’s a difference between a good story and a great story. A good story gets our attention. A great story changes us. Successful marketing campaigns and brand stories don’t convince us. They move us. A good leader gets our vote, and sometimes, our respect. A great leader gains our loyalty, and often, our love. We…

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The Power Of Assumptions

It was standing room only on the 109 tram, as it always is at five o’ clock on a Monday evening. As more passengers boarded the crowded carriage, a man holding a briefcase got up from his seat to let the woman standing in the aisle next to him sit down. She declined. He persisted.…

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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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The Assumptions Checklist

Our decisions are rarely based on objective information. And even when we do have ‘good data’, it’s coloured by why, who and how it’s collected. Often our decisions are based on assumptions. We accept something as true, without proof.  We make many of these assumptions with a scarcity mindset. We kill good ideas too soon…

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Do You Have A Customer Awareness Strategy?

The Friday evening tram was jam-packed with commuters, our bodies so closely pressed together you could feel the heat from the passenger standing next to you. As the tram made its way up Collins Street, the people travelling alone avoided eye contact.  Two women next to me were chatting about the black jacket the younger one…

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What The Best Communicators Do

Professor Daniel Kahneman has spent a lifetime researching why and how humans make decisions. His decades of work focused on the two ways we think and decide using one of two modes of thought, System 1 and System 2. System 1 makes fast, instinctive and emotional judgements and System 2 operates at a slower more…

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Disruption is…

The path to building a successful, sustainable business is littered with innovative ideas, requiring brave leadership to prioritise the needs of tomorrow’s customer above today’s bottom line. Disruption is having the courage to take the customer where they want to go. Image by Thomas Hawk

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Be Ambitious

In our culture ambition is both celebrated and frowned upon—not always in equal measure. Ambition is encouraged and rewarded, but only to a point. Perhaps it’s not ambition itself that’s the problem, but rather, our narrow definition of it? We aspire mostly to the ambition of accumulation. We want to be more and have more.…

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Design For The Outcome You Want

When a once beloved brand under new management, repeatedly relies on flash sales and deep discounts to boost sales, it’s obvious that the organisation’s goal is to massage the numbers on the next quarter’s balance sheet. The leadership team are designing the business for the outcome they want—short-term growth, on paper. A short-term strategy doesn’t…

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More Customers Vs. More For Customers

Every business begins with the founder’s intention about the outcome he or she wants to achieve. Every aspect of its development stems from that original intent. As businesses owners, leaders and creators, we can adopt one of two strategies. We can build a business with the intention of getting more customers, or we can want…

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