Hollywood and just about any other creative industry is filled with success stories of people to took big risks to find that “performance of a lifetime.” To some degree, these are what make awards like the Oscars so watchable. That actor who lost (or gained) 50 pounds in service of a great role, or the
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Six weeks ago every event got cancelled, postponed or moved to virtual. Like many professional speakers, I started delivering my talks virtually. But taking a 45 minute talk and doing it over Zoom doesn’t work. It’s too long, tech gets in the way and it just feels boring. I knew I had to get better
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In a world where everyone is constantly bombarded with examples of how the grass is greener somewhere else, earning true employee loyalty may soon be harder than ever.
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“A titanic amount of our economy is presently bullshit, and we’re working crazy hours to ensure that all the bullshit gets done.” This review of the newly released book Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber looks at some of the themes from the research of the author and why there are so many people doing jobs
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This week the entire US-based publishing industry is descending upon New York for a three day celebration of books known as the BookExpo. I’m here on behalf of my publishing company Ideapress, and so this week’s insights will focus on books. Below you will read about the bold new way that libraries are reinventing themselves
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Every year as part of my trend research and idea gathering, I go through more than a hundred business books and select my shortlist of 15 best ones published in 2016 to share with you. These are all profiled in a short presentation along with a review of each and my selections for the Most
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In case you hadn’t noticed, your bank wants to upsell you more services – and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. Unless your bank happens to be HSBC. There is a well known model in the financial industry for customer evolution that is based on lifetime customer value. If you deliver a great service and
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There’s a few things they don’t tell you about being on The Shark Tank. One of them is that every pitch on the popular reality business TV show starts with a silent 10 second staring contest. I spent an afternoon talking to a former (winning) contestant from the show, and one of the the insights
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Several weeks ago I saw a television special about television (no, that wasn’t a typo!). It was one of those programs where they look at old shows and interview the actors about what their lives are like now. When they came to Garry Shandling, the former star of the self-created Larry Sanders Show – this
Continue reading »Last year on a trip back to the US from South Africa, I picked up a magazine about a topic I knew very little about. It is of the common tricks I use to learn about different industries outside of the ones I work directly with – and in this case, the magazine I ended
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