Here’s a refreshing article from ‘Presentation Magazine‘- about a Venture Capitalist, the improbably named Guy Kawasaki, who has spent many of his working years as follows- “…I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending”, “first mover advantage”, “all we have to…
We’re restoring our house. A beautiful, but bedraggled victorian place, in Oundle, UK. The previous owner lived here for thirty years and spent virtually nothing on maintenance. Unfortunately he was a DIY enthusiast and had very little skill. We bought the house for its potential and saw past the tacked-up, bodged and home-made titivations that…
An audience’s willingness to act on your recommendations frequently depends on the severity and breadth of change you’re suggesting. In other words, your audience’s response to you, rests on how serious your audience thinks the problem is and how dire the consequences of inaction. ‘It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. ‘…
Holiday reading, staying in a friend’s lovely home in the green mountains north of Barcelona, Spain, I’d finished the crappy novel and trashy magazines I’d bought at the airport on the way out. What next for my idle mind while the kids were splashing in the pool? I was ‘mooching’ in the library, and I…
How about this for corporate nonsense- “Combining the strategy, business processes, implementation, and technical support skills of a CRM systems integrator with the data management, analytic, and marketing skills of a database marketing service provider to deliver and operate closed-loop marketing and sales environment.” What do you think the company ‘talking’ actually does. Do they…
Because they talk about their products and services from the wrong perspective. Inexperienced ‘sales’ people have an unfortunate tendency to talk from ‘inside to out’, rather than from the customer’s perspective in. Often the pitcher will start by describing their product and how it works before they get on to what it will do for…
Last week I asked you if you knew about how much help was available to save your life in this recession. Now here’s some more good advice, to help you build on that, from a reliable source. In May 2009, Omniture asked 120 US-based Marketing Managers to rate the relative effectiveness of their digital-marketing media….
Dinosaurs died out a few million years ago didn’t they? Why? Because they didn’t know what was coming and had no defence against the cold. How many dinosaurs in our business are dying from the cold right now? Millions I’d guess. Leviathans with fancy offices in London, New York, Paris Munich… (everybody’s talking ’bout….),…
I was asked this very pertinent question the other day, and I answered it, lazily, as follows- Your clients love your work and ask you back to do more at the next opportunity. You make money. Then someone said- “But what about doing a great job, objectively? Making a real difference, rather than just having your…