March 2005

Forthcoming events

The first will be Open Sauce, a morning workshop on 18 March at The Hub in Islington, London N1. We'll be looking at how collaboration with customers and other stakeholders is reshaping the marketing business. And demonstrating some ways to harness this to improve results. The cost is £125 (£50 for non-profits) plus VAT. More information here.

The second is The Elephant Under the Table. With my colleagues at The Clarity Partnership, I'll be explaining our approach to team building, based on bringing to the surface the difficult issues that people often avoid inside organisations. We'll be showing some of the ways we tackle these elephants to improve relationships and productivity. This is free - details here.

It would be great to see you at either of these events.

Recent highlights

These are some of the ideas and issues covered in my weblog in recent weeks...

Language to put you in your place

The tedious and arcane language in which business people communicate is calculated to impress - and often fails. Cathy Moore calls this corporate drone. Here's a snippet of her article:

Have you forgotten your place? Just read some Corporate Drone. "Oh, I remember now," you'll say. "My place is below this exalted writer. I am but a peon."

Barista Bankers

On a recent trip to New York, I stumbled upon the ING Cafe. Is it a coffeeshop or is it a bank? Hard to tell. But it struck me as a rare example of innovation in retail banking. Read more.

Another bit of radical innovation is promised by Zopa, who plan to match borrowers and lenders online, and thus bypass traditional banking altogether. Read more.

The answer to how is yes

I give a brief review to Peter Block's excellent book, The Answer to How is Yes. Block aruges

Despite its rhetoric, the culture does not value independent action. The culture wants to ask the family of How? questions: What does it cost? How long does it take? Where else has this worked? And we may have no good answers to these questions. When we say Yes instead, we acknowledge that acting on what we choose costs us something, which is what gives it value. If there were no price in saying Yes, to acting in the face of our doubts and meagre methodology, then the choice we make would have no meaning.

Achingly bad anthems

For some truly awful listening, check out these songs, produced for Ernst and Young and PWC. (Large music files) These are just two of the delights identified by Fight the Bull, the scourges of business waffle and hype.

Pitfalls of market research

I identify some of the pitfalls that mean market research is often a waste of time and money. This is one of my contributions to the new BrandShift blog organised by the respected Corante site.

Obliquity

My post on "obliquity" - why going directly for goals is sometimes counter-productive - generated quite a few comments and links.

Vicars and Charts?

An excellent article on the paradox of performance measurement by Simon Caulkin in The Observer. The devil is in the details. Here's a snippet:

How would you appraise a vicar's performance? By the number, length and quality of sermons? Attendance at church? Out of wedlock births? Ratio of marriages to divorce? Doctrinal purity?

This intriguing question was raised by proposals put forward last week by the Church of England's General Synod to make incompetent vicars easier to sack, and to subject them to the kind of performance measures that apply to other workers.