Category: change
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What’s the Difference Between a Company’s Purpose, Vision, Mission, and Values?
After posting about organisational purpose and profit, Jason asked a good question about what exactly is the difference between purpose and vision? My favourite definition of this comes from a template developed by NOBL which delineates between not only a company's purpose and vision, but also it's mission and values. And I quote: Purpose: Why you choose to…
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Purpose and Profit
“The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Peter Drucker I liked this piece in the FT (£) about the connection between organisational purpose and profit. This is not a new idea of-course – over a decade ago Jim Collins and Jerry Poras demonstrated (in Built to Last) that companies that were guided…
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Burberry Show How You Embrace Disruption
It was really interesting to read about Burberry's new strategy to combine its men’s and women’s collections together into one unified 'seasonless' collection to be shown at two annual runway events with the clothes available to buy straight after the shows. This is a big departure from decades of tradition. The established fashion calendar positioned…
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Frequency as a Lever for Change
Every business works to its own rhythms or time-related cycles which over time can become embedded and create established norms that influence and often dictate not only ways of working and processes, but strategies and thinking. Sometimes these cycles remain consistent over the long-term (like seasonally driven peaks) but one of the under-acknowledged impacts of digital…
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On Fluid Resourcing
There were a couple of points from Adrian Ho's post on organisational strategies for coping with complexity that resonated, particularly concerning structural fluidity. Most companies are rigidly organised around functional expertise (sales, marketing, finance, operations) which has apparent benefits in terms of shared learnings, goal-setting, reporting, efficiencies, but is not optimised for collaboration, customer experience,…
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Martec’s Law
I was lucky enough to be asked by (friend of ODF) Scott Brinker to speak at his excellent MarTech Europe conference last month. I think Scott has a rare ability for astute navigation of the increasingly (and already hugely) complex world of marketing technology. I saw the other day that he had tidied up his…
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Our Massive Employee Engagement Problem
A lot of digital transformation talk tends to focus relentlessly on technology but whilst this aspect is (of-course) important, my preference is to also talk about technology and transformation in the context of the behaviours, skills, resourcing and culture that surrounds it. As Henry Jenkins once said (almost a decade ago now, and a quote…
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Organising to Learn
Yesterday I spoke at the excellent Aerials event here in Toronto, curated by the folk behind The Alpine Review. The theme of the day was organisational agility in a networked world, and there was a wonderful line up of speakers including Mark Raheja from August, the consultancy born from the sad demise of Undercurrent. In…
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Co-Location and Concurrent Working in Agencies
I've just completed a major piece of research recently about the future of agencies – an update on the first report I authored on the subject back in 2012. It's quite amazing the amount of change that seems to have happened in the past few years. Many have talked about the inertia of agencies, and perhaps…
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Is the Life Expectancy of Companies Really Shrinking?
There is a prevailing narrative that the life expectancy of large companies, faced with the challenges of technological disruption, has been reducing for some time. Work done (PDF) by Professor Richard Foster of Yale University (above, and which I talked about here) in particular, seems to show that the average lifespan of a company in the S&P 500…