Plan the Work and Whack the Mole!
“I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
I am flummoxed at how businesses large and small do planning. I have seen everything from fire, fire, fire to the most rigorous matrixed multi-faceted linked excel workbooks with circles and arrows.
So, what constitutes [...]
I recently had a wonderful, lengthy, wide-ranging conversation with one of our clients. I don’t do this nearly enough, and it’s always a top new years’ resolution for me. Anyway, upon reflection, I think our conversation covered the five universal truths in marketing. I submit them here for your consideration:
1. Good ideas come from anywhere. [...]
My real interest lies in how to operationalize marketing. This is a semi-fancy way of how to do marketing better. (And, full disclosure, I am more of a student at this than a teacher.)
In fact, my pursuit often seems Quixote-esque, as different companies do marketing so differently that it’s hard to draw any meaningful and [...]
‘Communications’ is a funny thing.
But before I get there, I really want to talk about what I think is the absolute fundamental key to business success, and that’s ‘alignment’. If everyone knows the corporate goals, and is aimed at helping to achieve them in a meaningful and tangible way with all that [...]
I wonder what kind of brand you manage? To paraphrase the old adage, if you don’t know who you are, how can you ever get better? So I’ve developed this simple tool to help define what kind of brand or business you run. It’s pretty easy – first, decide what kind of [...]