Paradoxically, great art lies in what the painter chooses to leave out as much as what s/he decides to put in. Similarly, the art of business strategy is not just about deciding what you are going to do; just as important is deciding what you are not going to do. Having a ‘must not do’ …
Category: Recent Posts
‘Lateral-Thinking’ Leadership
The most effective leaders learn from other industries and sectors. “Most [executives] think they are in touch with the outside world if they play golf with the vice-president of another company in the same industry.” – Professor Peter Drucker. Management Guru. (Financial Times. London. 16 November 2004.) Research commissioned by the UK Government’s Department of …
The Community Interest Company (CIC)
The Community Interest Company is a legal structure designed for Social Enterprises. Company legislation was never designed for community and voluntary sector organisations whose ethos is ‘not-for-profit’ (or more precisely ‘non-profit-distributing’). Social enterprises, in particular, have no legal structure designed specifically for them and tend to register as a ‘Company Limited by Guarantee without Share …
Protecting – and profiting from – your Intellectual Property
How do you protect your creative works? And importantly – how do you generate income streams from your intellectual property? Creative people are rightly concerned about being ripped off, so we need to know more about how to protect our works by understanding and using intellectual property rights (IPR) such as copyright, trade marks, patents …
Selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts
Cassandra Postema and Dong Shing Chiu (pictured) are in the business of selling hope, wrapped up in t-shirts called ‘Hope Tees’. Their Hong Kong creative enterprise is called ‘Dialog’ because it embodies an exchange of conversations between marginalised Asian textile craft wisdom and modern western design. The result is an attractive and fun range of …
Inspirational Leadership
“Leadership is not magnetic personality – that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not ‘making friends and influencing people’ – that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to high sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.” …
What are you selling, really?
If you’re a creative business or cultural enterprise, you are selling goods or services to customers, whether it’s graphic design, fashion, architecture, music, crafts, theatre, film or books. But what are you selling, really? Or to put it another way, what is it that the customer is really buying from you? It’s often the case …
Don’t Advertise! Let your customers do the plogging
Advertising is so last century! Advertising doesn’t work any more. Instead, customers talk – like never before. continue to full article… Download article (PDF, 92KB) Download let_your_customers_do_the_plogging. David Parrish. T-Shirts and Suits. 240407.pdf
Buzz Marketing
Buzz Marketing is another term for ‘Word of Mouth’ marketing, ie creating a ‘buzz’ as people spread the word about a product or service. Buzz Marketing could be described as turbo-charged word-of-mouth marketing. The difference for me is that word of mouth advertising can happen at a low level. It’s great, and many creative businesses …
Viral Marketing
The term ‘viral marketing’ describes any strategy that passes a marketing message from one person to another – and goes on to spread ‘like a virus’. In other words, the message must spread automatically as one person contacts another (like a virus). To be able to do this, the marketing message must be built into …