And conversely, the power of strong, lived values A company's values are becoming an increasingly important part of a market's buying decision making - and that market is made of up thousands or millions of individual people. And, in a world where people are losing trust in governments and other traditional guiding institutions (Edelman Trust...
Read MoreIn today's rapidly evolving business landscape, complexity seems to be a persistent constant. As business owners and CEOs, the challenge is not just to navigate this complexity but to thrive within it. We humans have been running businesses for a long time (several thousand years), so you'd think we would have a good handle on how to do that....
Read MoreAs I talk to business owners, I often enquire as to what is high on their list of headache inducing issues - and the 2 that are most commonly mentioned are money and people. And it's been like that for many, many years. The specific details may change, but those 2 categories
Read MoreAnd while we can look at the legacy of human endeavour for many answers to today's questions, there is a much richer and older source of inspiration and ideas that could help us solve many of our more tactical and systemic challenges. And that is the natural world around us. Over millions or billions of years of evolution, living organisms...
Read MoreThe London Stock exchange, founded in 1571, has the motto “dictum meum pactum” on its coat of arms. It shows that members of the exchange are literally bound by what they say – without need of a written contract. In more modern times we would say, ‘my word is as good as my
Read MoreWe've probably all seen starlings. Brownish birds that hang around in groups, often with quite thuggish behaviour as they swarm a food source to the exclusion of all other birds. If you look a little closer, you might notice that when they catch the light, there seems to be some iridescence to their feathers - and if you stand back you...
Read MoreYou don't build a business – you build people – and then people build the business. Zig Ziglar I was recently running a workshop for a client to address the way they worked (their processes and organisational structures) and they way they worked together (communications and culture). During the energised conversation, I was reminded once again...
Read MoreWay back in the swinging '60s, Jane Ball pioneered the first digital dating enterprise in London, England. Her secret sauce? Unconventionally successful. Instead of probing about desires, she asked what people decidedly ‘did not want’. It turns out that individuals had a foggy view of their wants, but a crystal-clear vision of what they did not...
Read MoreIn previous years words like volatility, instability, steady state were often used to describe the business economy. But this year, the big thinkers are using the word uncertainty which is a polite way of saying they haven’t got a clue. Why is this? We have a rise in the number of powerful dictators, ungoverned by rule of law, which means things...
Read MoreUnless you've been living under a rock, you've probably noticed that AI, Large Language Models, and ChatGPT are the talk of the town. I've been to a number of conventions, seminars, and conferences over the last month, and almost every session, every conversation, every panel includes some reference to
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