Strategic Branding

How Small Companies Can Build a Culture of Innovation

Reading through Forbes’ list of the world’s most innovative companies might be discouraging to small business owners.

Strategic Branding

Why Thinking About Success Leads to Failure

There is such a strong focus on success that it’s hard to not be influenced by it at some level.

Marketing

4 Things to Know about Human Centered Design

Everyone knows that the most important person in a business’ path to success is the customer.

Strategic Branding

Where Change Management Meets Branding

The following is a guest post by Maja Frigelj, a Business Strategy Consultant with a major consulting firm in Washington, DC and fellow entrepreneur as Founder of DC Language Services.

Innovation & Insights

When Everything is Beautiful

Coming across the this commercial the other day, I was caught off guard.

Organizational Transformation

Designing Organizations for Dialogue

In an article in TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences titled “Why is conversation so easy?,” Simon Garrod and Martin J.

Innovation & Insights

If Bell Labs Thinks It's Impossible...

And at this time, they really weren't. Most radio companies were really large pieces of furniture.

Organizational Transformation

Larry Page's Simple Metric

In the book Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think,Peter Diamandis quotes Larry Page on his new metric.

Organizational Transformation

Getting a New Perspective

In order to change something for the better, you have to know what the original state is.

Organizational Transformation

Inspiring Your Passion

Sometimes we need something or someone to remind us of the dreams and passions we have within us.

Strategic Branding

How Brands Shape Taste Perception

The Coke and Pepsi challenge. We all remember it.

Digital

What's obvious to you?

They showed me three things. One of the things they showed me was object-oriented programming.

Innovation & Insights

Caffeine Free Creativity Boost

Coffitivity is a new site that provides a free coffee shop vibe right in the middle of your own cubicle. They suggest to play your music just a hair about Coffitivity.

Organizational Transformation

Jobs, Chez-Panisse and the 90% Disease

The 1995 documentary Steve Jobs The Lost Interviews has Jobs talking about the disease that he believed Jon Scully was inflicted with.

Strategic Branding

Principles of Good (Brand) Management

In his autobiography Models of My Life (WorldCat), Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon talks about his experience with good management and tries to describe what makes it tick.

Organizational Transformation

The Problem With Experts

If we look at some of the most interesting work in any field, its usually being done by people who are directly familiar with a field, but are no longer working in it.

Innovation & Insights

The Cognitive Science of Good Diagramming

There’s just something about well drawn diagrams.

Relationships & Revenue

DC Metro Ad Test Answers

Being important is not the same as conveying importance. When dealing with ads all organizations must operate under the same rules of human attention and interest as everyone else. Developing a clear and consistent history of experience can provide organizations certain benefits, almost rights, in the marketplace as they move forward.

Strategic Branding

How to Spot New Markets

Part of seeing new markets is about being able to move between focal points. On one extreme, you need to take in all of the information you can.

Relationships & Revenue

Can you pass this DC Metro ad test?

On my daily walk out of the Metro station, I came across the ads below.

Organizational Transformation

Chimps and the Guaranteed Great Leap Forward

In the Third Chimpanze, Jared Diamond calls it the Great Leap Forward (actually calls "them" great leaps as the earlier getting upright part was pretty big, but we'll focus on the later one).

Innovation & Insights

10 Paradoxes of Creativity

The challenge with creativity is that it can be hard to pin down.

Relationships & Revenue

Good Design Reminder c/o Dieter Rams

Relationships & Revenue

Dishes, Virality and Social Media

My wife points out that I still haven’t learned to do the dishes the right way. She says I use too much water. Like most things, she’s right.

Strategic Branding

Scaling the World as We Know It

He defines the term broadly as “an increase in scale” and see it more as a cluster of “more or less interrelated transitions.

Innovation & Insights

What Can You Learn From a Futurist?

Wendell Bell is a Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Yale University and is known as one of the most respected members of futurist community.

Doing what you don’t know you’re doing?

Riding home the other day on the Metro, there was a lady sitting in front of me reading some documents. At one of the stops a young African-American woman came in and sat right next to her.

Innovation

Customers vs. Stakeholders

Talk to any MBA and it’s bound to slip out - stakeholders.

Strategic Branding

5 Ways to Design Like Apple

Apple is constantly used as a benchmark when it comes to design and branding and John Edson’s book Design Like Apple, presents some interesting insights and takeaways for organizations looking to better connect with their customers.

Organizational Transformation

How's Your Perception Training?

Discussions of perception usually revolve around the five senses - sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell.

Relationships & Revenue

Assets Aren't Experience

I probably don’t ride public transportation enough. But today I made up for it a bit with a bus and train ride.

Relationships & Revenue

Three Days After. Three Ads Remembered.

Having watched the Super Bowl XLVII online, I didn’t get the full treatment of commercials, but I did take a peek the other day.

Branding

Bad Brands to Good People

Making things happen in today’s hyper-competitive, multi-channel marketplace means going non-stop in the direction you’re going.

Relationships & Revenue

When 1997 Design is Still Good Enough

I was on the Berkshire Hathaway site the other day and was amazed out how simple - I mean really simple - the site was.