Category: inspiration
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Bake a Bigger Pie
In the Q & A following her wonderful talk at Gooogle Firestarters last Wednesday, Sue Unerman drew from this quote, taken from Guy Kawasaki's book Enchantment: “There are two kinds of people and organizations in the world: eaters and bakers. Eaters want a bigger slice of an existing pie; bakers want to make a bigger…
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Google Firestarters 16 – The Magnificent Seven
For our next London Google Firestarters event we have an absolutely stellar line up. We are bringing together seven of the smartest brains in strategy and planning to answer a simple but compelling question: What is the most useful thing that you have learned to date in your career? That’s it. No gimmicks, no long drawn…
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Creativity in Business
This, from The Book of Life: "…business creativity is a little different from artistic creativity. A company is a group of individuals gathered together to solve a problem for other people. This helps to define what the true focus of business creativity should be: intense and lateral thinking about what could be missing from the…
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Visual Cues, Habits and Motivation
My first job after University (which was actually a Polytechnic if you can remember back when there were such things) was selling space in recruitment directories. There was a recession on at the time (hence very few jobs for graduates with non-vocational degrees) and I kind of fell into it. But in many ways I…
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On To-Do Lists
I rather liked this approach to doing a To-Do list from Peter Bregman, taken from this write up (found via Fraggl) of his 18 Minute plan to managing your day and finding focus. What I particularly like about it is the more comprehensive way in which it is inclusive of elements that sit outside of work tasks.…
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Google Firestarters Comes to Australia
I'm really excited to announce that, on the heels of our events in New York and our recent one in Austin at SXSW, Google Firestarters is coming to Australia. We'll be running two events in one week – one in Melbourne on the 21st April, and one in Sydney on the 22nd April – both on the theme…
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Two Great Quotes on Strategy
This from Good Strategy/Bad Strategy (via @amayfield): "The first natural advantage of good strategy arises because other organisations often don't have one. And because they don't expect you to have one either. A good strategy has coherence, coordinating actions, policies and resources so as to accomplish an important end. Many organisations, most of the time, don't have this.…
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Google Firestarters 15: How To Think Differently About Advertising – The Event
Monday saw the interested and interesting of UK planning come together for our 15th Google Firestarters event. Our sole speaker on the evening was planning legend Paul Feldwick, who talked about his controversial new book The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising. Paul spent 30 years as an Account Planner at BMP…
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Google Firestarters Austin – Engineering Strategy – The Event
Saturday saw our first ever Firestarters event in Austin, held in the Google Fiber space during SXSWi. We'd themed the event around the intersection of user experience design and strategy which, judging from the audience feedback and debate on the night is rich territory for discussion right now. Perhaps unsurprising given the growth in importance…
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Disrupting Wall Street
I've been in Austin at SXSWi for the past few days putting on our first Google Firestarters here (more on that soon) and so have been attending some of the sessions whilst I'm here. Someone said to me before I came out that it was better to go to the smaller, off-topic (i.e. non branding/marketing/content)…