Who Trusts You?

We spend a lot of time wondering who we can trust. We are careful to work out who is worthy of our friendship, business or time. And yet, we often fail to make the connection between trust and success when it comes to ourselves. You don’t become trusted by being more successful. You become successful…

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Start Setting Your Brand Storytelling Goals

We expect brand storytelling to do a lot of heavy lifting for our business. We want our story to engage prospective customers and communicate the value we create. We rely on storytelling to create a sense of belonging and encourage people to believe in our brand. Ultimately we expect that our story will convince and…

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The Measure Of Greatness

I will never forget the first assembly at my children’s school in Australia. Our family had newly migrated to Perth, Western Australia. We wanted to settle our boys as quickly as possible into their new life. So, much to our ten-year-old’s disgust, they were in new schools within two weeks of our arrival. There we…

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The Difference Between A Weak Brand And A Strong Brand

The biggest mistake a brand can make is to try being all things to everyone. Weak brands settle for doing what’s easy or obvious. They appeal to the market of everyone, avoid the edges and thus become interchangeable with their competitors. Strong brands know they are this and not that. They intentionally aspire to be something…

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How To Fill The Gap That’s Yours To Fill

No bookstore can stock more books than Amazon. No local clothing designer can launch a new range faster than Zara. No artisan chocolatier can sell chocolate cheaper than Cadbury. If there’s nothing your bigger, faster, cheaper competitors can’t do, how will your business keep up? How will you survive, let alone thrive? Your sustainable advantage…

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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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The Best Of Us

Our youngest son got his first paying job at a fast food restaurant this summer. He’d walked up and down the street handing out resumes for days and got a single call back. He was interviewed over the phone and invited in for trial one evening. He got the gig. Twenty dollars an hour and…

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Choosing To Be Better

Every business begins with a choice to be better. Not necessarily to be better than the competition, but to be a better option for the people it hopes to serve. As we become mired in the day-to-day work of business building, we can lose sight of our original intention. Nike’s Bill Bowerman chose to be…

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Now Vs. Next

We’ve come to believe that the ability to focus on the future is the cornerstone of achievement, success and progress. But we’re in such a hurry to get there we often sacrifice the opportunity to do our best work in this moment. The irony, of course, is that tomorrow’s success is dependent on the groundwork…

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Who Cares?

It’s easy to assume that a delicious meal is about the magic that happens when the chef, who we think has the most skin in the game, directly influences the end product. Is the perfect plate of pasta a result of the quality of the ingredients or the skill of the chef? How much does…

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