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The principles in my book, What Great Brands Do:  The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best from the Rest can be applied to employees, employee experience, and employee engagement. For example, in WGBD, I explain that Great Brands Avoid Selling Products.  Instead of simply focusing on selling products or services to customers, great brands […]

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Social media influencers and AI platforms are changing the way we connect with customers; they are also changing the way we use brands. Today brands are not only marketing outputs and strategic inputs. They are – or at least they should be – cultural cornerstones. Here is why. related: Prepare Your Culture for a Recession […]

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In difficult times like the COVID-19 pandemic and protests over racial injustice, you might be tempted to hunker down, keep a low profile, and avoid taking on risk.  But now is not the time to pull back; you have the opportunity to push forward. In fact, crisis tend to separate those leaders who are able […]

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Are you cancelling your conference?  Postponing an event?  Re-thinking your approach to in-person learning and development programs?  I would like to help you navigate the disruption and uncertainty caused by the coronavirus and the restrictions that have ensued. I understand that just because you aren’t gathering people together doesn’t mean that your need to equip […]

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Apple announced it is moving into services — Netflix-type services, curating and streaming content.  It’s a pretty big shift for a company that’s been primarily in hardware and software.  If any company CAN make the shift, it’s Apple — but I wonder if it SHOULD.  Will the core of the Apple brand be eroded in […]

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03.13.18

FUSION Is Here

It’s launch day for my new book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies!!   Get your copy here. Check out this introduction: […]

Some of my favorite quotes about corporate culture include “Culture is strategy” (Jim Collins), “The only way to change a corporate culture is to just change it” (Gordon Bethune), and “No company, small or large, can win over the long run without energized employees who believe in the mission and understand how to achieve it” (Jack […]

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Leaders of great organizations have tremendous clarity about the brand identity they aspire to embody and about how to cultivate an organizational culture that enables them to achieve it. Jeff Bezos has made the Amazon brand synonymous with innovations that delight customers by cultivating a culture that doggedly pursues those innovations. Richard Branson has created […]

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When Viad Corp.‘s Travel and Recreation Group undertook a re-branding in 2016, there were several objectives for the transformation including identifying a new name.  Instead of delegating the undertaking to the marketing department, as most organizational leaders would, President David Barry believed the most fundamental element of the transformation was employee engagement with the brand.  […]