“To sell well is to convince someone else to part with resources – not to deprive that person but to leave him better off in the end.”

Daniel Pink, auther of “Drive” and “To Sell is Human” Read More

Selling has a bad name, especially in Europe. And here’s an American trying to tell us we are all selling, all the time. Sounds yuck? Fortunately it’s a lot more subtle than that. In fact he’s really saying that true selling is not about foot-in-the-door persistence but about listening, empathy, and seeking to serve others. You knew that already didn’t you? So you can skip the first section, where he redefines selling and illustrates how we are all natural sales people. Read More

Time is money but few organisations treat it that way. A junior person who can’t sign off a $1000 invoice can schedule a regular meeting which costs twenty times that in management salaries, with no approval process at all. So says a well-researched piece in this month’s issue of Harvard Business Review (Reprint R1405D). A team from Bain used information from the online calendars of executives across more than a dozen large corporations to show how casually time is treated. Read More

“I think as a species we’re not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future – if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they’ve been given a huge boring chunk of homework that’s too hard to do.”

Douglas Coupland, American author Read More

What do Chelsea tractors and email overload tell us about forecasting?

Picture yourself in a trends workshop, innovation brainstorm or scenario planning day, one day in the not-too-distant past. Your task is to help an automotive company see what sort of vehicles people in Europe will want in the future. Here’s what you’re being told. Fuel prices are rising. There’s a lot of talk about “peak oil” (whatever happened to that?). There are more and more cars on the roads, Read More

“Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others.”

Groucho Marx Read More

A friend, let’s call him Alan, confessed to me that, through a combination of devotion to Nick Cave and a senior moment, he had pre-ordered a new Nick Cave album on Amazon twice, three months apart. Realising his mistake when two CDs arrived separately, he contacted Amazon to arrange for a return and a refund. Their response: we understand how these things happen. Don’t bother to return it, we’ll credit your account anyway.

Now imagine some other possible responses. Read More

“Games are won by players who focus on the playing field – not by those whose eyes are glued to the scoreboard.”

Warren Buffett, aka the Sage of Omaha Read More

Marketers should not focus on return on investment (ROI) as their key metric. Why not? Because it is not ambitious enough.

ROI is a helpful way to compare media choices, or different creative options, or even different service models. It is an important tool for marketers to make choices, and to improve. But be careful: it’s also a trap.

Sometimes ROI looks like clear proof of money well spent, to justify budgets to others. Read More

“Big data doesn’t replace big ideas.”

Tom Fishburne, Marketoonist Read More