“All my best decisions are made with heart, guts and taste” Instinct or algorithm? It’s a question that Karen Blackett OBE asked her three interviewees at her Chancellor’s Dinner at Portsmouth University last month. Kanya King OBE, supercool founder of the MOBOS said instinct. Sir Lenny Henry CBE fresh from raising money for Comic Relief…

Just kind In a business that is under disruption, sometimes the best decision you can make is to be kind. At the IPA conference for International Women’s Day one of the key note speakers Pinky Lilani CBE, Founder, Women of the Future, talked about the importance of kindness in modern leadership.  She said that her business…

There’s plenty of debate about campaigns with purpose.  Much of it very intelligent and informed.  Should marketers invest in campaigns that go beyond communicating the benefits of the product or service advertised and extend into a wider purpose for society with which the brand wants to associate? Does purpose pay is often the question.  And…

Some days are more inspirational than others. In the morning my client Mark Evans, CMO at Direct Line Group, mentioned that he’d been discussing the fact that Binet and Field’s now omnipresent thinking The Long and the Short of It, was applicable to more stuff than marketing science (crucial though this is).  And if anyone…

The if only awards Awards season is on us again (is it ever not these days?), with entries due for Campaign Media, Marketing Soc, Thinkbox, Outdoor, Festival of Media and more. Enormous effort will be made to ensure that each brilliant idea is explained properly, and the results will be polished up to look as…

“No idea is a bad idea” is one of the sacred rules of brainstorming. The concept is based on the theory that ideas are like young plants. Rain too hard on them and they will wilt away. Don’t criticise. Warm them in the greenhouse of sunshine approval. This is one of the founding rules laid…

“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” (Yogi Berra and others). January is the month for pundits to place their best bets for the year. We need not go very far though these days to know what nonsense those bets usually amount to.  In respect of outlooks and outcomes for 2019 the bookies…

“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never” Winston Churchill I’ve always been inspired by persistence.  When you fall down, you get back up again.  Yet a fact based argument in the much resp‎ected Harvard Business Review challenges this idea. Cass Business School’s professor Andre Spicer says that there’s in fact a “weak link…

Often when mentoring, in a one to one, it will be clear that the mentees worst critic is the one they see very regularly, daily in fact.  Often when they are tired and stressed.  Often when they are at a low point.  It’s the one they see in the mirror. Its very common.  In my…

There’s a reason that organisations that have real diversity thrive. It is not just a tick box exercise. It’s the synthesis of people with differences of opinion, personality and thinking.  It’s the ultimate “Avengers Assemble” team (as WPP UK Country Manager Karen Blackett puts it). These teams are not groups of people who love hanging…

Fake news is everywhere, swaying politics, election results, public opinion. Fake news permeates our business too. You only need to attend a conference or browse your Twitter feed to come across media business fake news, such as, for example: “Brands are dead.” At a recent panel (Chatham House Rules) there was a fellow panellist who…

If you read this blog, you’ll have a better chance of being promoted, paid more, liked more, going home early. Got your attention? “What’s in it for you?” as a strategy is in fact short term and unsustainable for marketing, for management and finally for life. “What’s in it for you?” can be a successful…