“Is having a sacred playbook an asset that companies should preserve at all costs, or does it become a liability holding companies back as the world around them changes? Is there a point at which a company’s size, growth, and industry-spanning tentacles make a unified culture of decision-making and inventing impossible?” These questions, posed in […]
Treating your employees like family sounds nice, but makes no sense. In fact, trying to run your organization as a family – or even merely saying that you do — will hold you back, and may even backfire. Your company is not like a family because: You have to let people go. You must set and […]
Hot off the presses or out of the recording studio, here are 5 new resources on employee engagement from me: Engaging Employees Starts with Remembering What Your Company Stands For — on Harvard Business Review. Most engagement efforts fail because they’re generic. Fuse Customer Experience and Employee Experience to Drive Your Growth — on Forbes. Adobe […]
Here are 25 surprising things you will learn about brand and culture in my new book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies. […]
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. […]
“Bruising.” “Relentless.” “Painful.” “Frequent combat.” “Burn and churn.” No one would fault you for thinking a company with a workplace culture described in these harsh terms is destined for failure. Yet, one such company recently nearly doubled its operating income, increased its annual revenue by 27%, and turned in its 8th straight quarter of profitability. […]
While the importance of workplace culture is well-understood, how to build a great culture is less established. In the research and work I did leading to my upcoming book, FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies (published by Nicholas Brealey, an imprint of Hachette Book Group on March 13, 2018), I […]
Call me old school, but I really enjoy the written word. I prefer reading a long-form blog post or article than a pithy tweet or fleeting Facebook post. That’s not to say that I want a writer to blather on — rather, I like reading the work of people who have mastered the written word […]
From What Great Brands Do: By connecting internal culture to broader cultural movements, great brands create futures in which they thrive and grow. What do I mean? How about: Lululemon Athletica employees are part of the movement that’s making yoga more than just an exercise routine. Zappos employees are on a mission to “wow” customers at just […]
Yay! It’s finally here! The official launch of my book, What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles That Separate the Best from the Rest (Jossey-Bass). […]