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 …

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 …

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 …

“The future is not something hidden in a corner. The future is something we build in the present.” - Paulo Freire.

So what can you change today? Right now?

I came across this great site by Signature Strategies with succinct information and pointers on how to write positioning, vision and mission statements for your business.

Well worth a look, especially if you are a small business.

In a long conversation with Anita Kapoor yesterday about creativity and innovation in Singapore, we touched on the topic of the government’s interest in encouraging businesses to get involved with the arts.

One idea that appeared was this: artist in residence programmes within corporations.

Businesses do buy art. So why not buy an artist?

The really interesting, meaty part of this is: how can a business leverage the …

For those who have worked with me, you will know that I usually carry two notebooks with me: a quarto sized paper notebook, and a Thinkpad. They are about the same width-length dimensions.

The paper notebook is my default interactive meeting pad. It lets me scribble freeform notes and draw diagrams during meetings as part of the process of the meeting. I find conversation-enabled doodling to be an effective …

I blogged about being annoyed by Freedom Escapes’ telemarketing calls a while ago.

I recently had a look at the comments. Talk about a mountain growing out of an ant hill (we don’t have moles in Australia). They are obviously still cold calling people. And those who are annoyed enough to go online to vent have subsequently found my site via Google. I also occasionally get personal emails …

Should pedestrians keep left or right. Which is it? It depends on where you are. Maybe.

In melting pot societies (fondue societies?) like Sydney and Singapore, with residents from different parts of the world, it is useful to post explicit signs instead or relying on the unspoken rules.

Singapore is somewhat better in this respect, given their history as a more explicitly “managed” society. Heavy traffic areas often do have …