No Team GB Olympic organiser or coach could’ve really expected we’d finish fourth. Publicly, they refused to be drawn on targets and predictions (very wise) but privately they must’ve sat on the fence with quiet confidence and, no doubt, more than a modicum of fear. Yet, Team GB shattered all expectations and it’s praise indeed […]
The overall pass rate for this year’s GCSE results was an astounding 98.4%. Instead of celebrating this as faculty brilliance, we’re all berating it as a farce. New Labour’s (now very old) mantra of ‘education, education, education’ needs to be seen as reality, not political theory, and these figures apparently do just that. It’s very […]
The variable cost of emailing is so small, they’re practically free. So if you’ve got the type of boss who throws pennies around like manhole covers he’s going to love them. ‘I want you to send emails, lots of them. Then send some more. Blitz ‘em, flood the damn database.’ A bit extreme but you […]
Since the Yahoo! and Microsoft will-they, wont-they saga I’ve taken a closer interest in uber-investor, Carl Icahn. That most capitalist of papers, The Wall Street Journal, recently wrote a very non-flattering piece about him. Mr Icahn has blogged his thoughts on the article, tearing the journalist’s (though I doubt he thinks she’s worthy of the […]
Every person in your organisation who has contact – direct or otherwise – with your customers is a marketer. Fact. The guy who served me popcorn in the cinema on the weekend is a marketer. He could’ve asked cheerily ‘What movie are you guys heading to?’ but he didn’t. Instead he decided to make his […]
We all know history shows us nothing lasts. The Roman Empire, the Warsaw Pact, the telegram, the Two Ronnies… whatever. You name it and time will show itself to have moved swiftly on. Google had another record month in June performing 7.1 billion searches, but I predict, with a prize-fighter’s confidence, that Google cannot remain […]
F1 fans will know the popular mantra well-used across the sport, ‘If you’re not going forwards, you’re actually going backwards.’ It speaks volumes for everyone’s permanent devotion to improving through innovation (and invention of course). You see, over the course of a season teams will gain a handful of seconds per lap. Therefore, if you’re […]
Selling is as often as much about the lack of negatives as it is about the number of positives beholden to your features and benefits. That restaurant you ate in last month may have had clean cutlery and smartly dressed staff but you didn’t think better of them for it, did you? That’s because you […]
Got a presentation coming up? This is where the bar is for attention and this is where the bar is for Powerpoint and Keynote. There’s a little bit of help for you here. And finally, as a priest once told me of his sermons: be sharp; be brief; be gone.