Thursday 27th Sep, 2012
Stephen Garrett is the man behind Kudos, makers of some of the most successful programmes on British TV over the last decade, including Spooks, Hustle, Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes. A little over a decade ago he was staring down a barrel.
Thursday 9th Aug, 2012
Three quarters of senior executives say that thought leadership is the most effective way for a consulting firm to market its services, a recent survey we carried out reveals. Thought leadership, we know, can help ensure a consulting firm is invited to pitch for a piece of work; it strengthens existing relationships by providing a reason to stay in touch and is a vital door-opener where new clients are concerned. Another survey we’ve just completed shows that it even plays a role in the decision about which firm goes on an organisation’s Tier 1 preferred supplier list.
Monday 9th Jul, 2012
Enough about me. Let’s talk about you…. What do you think about me? I love that joke. It is the perfect metaphor for so many things. And it’s something that I refer to frequently when talking to clients. The fact is, people are obsessed with themselves. OK, maybe that’s a bit strong. But it is fair to say that if you can make what you’re communicating about me, and not just about some random “other” who may or may not be like me, I am far more likely to listen to you, really hear you, understand you and, perhaps most importantly, remember you (and your message.)
Friday 29th Jun, 2012
According to socialbakers[i], LinkedIn has over 155 million members, nearly 10 million of whom are in the UK. And if our own experiences are anything to go by, LinkedIn can be a very valuable resource for hiring, sharing thought leadership, identifying connections within target clients, and giving a good impression to people you may wish to work with.
Tuesday 26th Jun, 2012
A packed train from Manchester to London and no room to type, an iPad stowed in my bag (carefully sneaked out of the house before the children awoke) and an email alerting me to the arrival of a new edition of a business magazine meant I spent over an hour last week (once I’d cleaned off the sticky fingerprints) browsing the latest thinking at McKinsey Quarterly.
Monday 14th May, 2012
The narrower your focus, the bigger your audience: it doesn’t sound right, does it? Accustomed to the idea of mass-media, we assume that material with the broadest appeal will be read by the most people. But the internet and social media may invert that relationship: because people can pick and choose what they want to see, they’re more likely to look at material which focuses on their interests than at more generic content.
Saturday 28th Jan, 2012
In the BBC’s The Life Scientific professor and physicist, Jim Al-Khalili, quizzes scientists about their backgrounds and about what spurred them on to success, often in the face of ostensibly insuperable odds. It would have been very easy for these to be fairly anodyne conversations, but Al-Khalili doesn’t duck the difficult issues, as when he asks Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell what it felt like to miss out on the Nobel Prize many of her colleagues thought she deserved: “It wasn’t fair was it really?” he
Thursday 19th Jan, 2012
For a while now we’ve been sending out summaries of what we think is the best thought leadership on a given subject. Leafing the newest selection, I was struck by material which, although aimed at client organisations, should also be required reading for consulting firms themselves.
Monday 19th Dec, 2011
“Our thought leadership production process is a well-oil machine.” It was a throwaway line someone said in early December which has been reverberating around in my head ever since, for several reasons.
Monday 17th Oct, 2011
Leafing through IBM’s chief marketing officer study, published in the last few days, I was struck by one particular chart which compares the reasons companies think their customers follow them via social media sites and their customers’ actual reasons. Interesting in its own right, it’s also – I’d argue – directly relevant to consulting firms.
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