Taking a page from Peter Drucker’s The 5 Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organisation which I posted about yesterday, here is my adaptation of the questions applied to your next marketing/corporate communications activity, be this an ad campaign or a new website:

What is the point of this activity? And how does it tie in with our mission?
Who are we speaking to?
What needs/desires/wants of theirs …

Peter Drucker has a book out at the moment entitled The 5 Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organisation.

Here are the five questions:

What is our mission?
Who is our customer?
What does the customer value?
What are our results?
What is our plan?

These apply equally well to you, ie your personal brand.

It may well be worth your while sitting down with a cup of coffee on a quiet morning …

According to Paul Bracken in his article Futurizing Business Education (Futurist magazine July-August 2008), there are four major characteristics of the turbulent world businesses are faced with today:

Technology – rapidly and dramatically transforms industries.
Political risks – decisions at a political have direct impact.
Blurring of industry boundaries – businesses are chasing radically new markets beyond the bounds of their traditional offerings.
New competitors with different strategic personalities – emerging economies …

This is a fun little demonstration on how we see, or don’t see, some things that are immediately in front of our eyes.

http://www.dothetest.co.uk/

Thanks to Gavin and Ingrid for this.

A display-window-sized poster scaring shoppers in front of a shop in Singapore.

Take the gentrified DIY that is Ikea, combine/reuse/rethink how the bits fit together, combine kits, turn things upside down/inside out… and you have Ikea Hacker!

Love it!

I stumbled upon this site by David Hudd while looking up some of Bridget Riley’s excellent art today.

It is a site for disgruntled users of Apple PowerBooks with faulty screens to post their grievances in spite of Apple’s efforts at censoring these complaints on their official sites.

“Apple constantly close down, lock or delete any threads containing manufactoring[sic] information, photographs or links …

Here’s an interesting article on the role of our emotions in decision-making.

Points of note:

Without our emotions, we will have difficulty making decisions.
Strong emotions like fear can adversely affect our decisions.
The more we deny our emotions, the less able we are to make a decision; regardless of how much info we have.
Relying on our gut instincts is important.
Women make better decisions - because women are more in …

Reflecting on my post and the ensuing in-depth discussion
Fostering involvement and buy-in – what the cat taught me

The very act of us discussing the very topic of transparency is transparency at work! Isn’t it ironic.

If I were a more conventional business, I would not be engaging in this discussion. And certainly not in public and with someone who could become a potential customer (ie someone I have …

This is a nicely written piece by Stephen McElhinney reflecting on the challenges faced by Singapore in its attempts to become more creative as a nation.

The “Missing T” refers to Richard Florida’s three T’s required to jump start a creative economy: Technology, Talent and Tolerance. McElhinney argues that Singapore’s key challenge is the historical suppression of the last T.

On the subject of tolerance, …