Communication

Leadership & Management

Press 1 for Frustration, Press 2 for Irony

Graham Birkenhead, August 19 2025

Over the last couple of weeks, quite coincidentally, I’ve had to contact a surprising number of customer service desks.  This has included IT, hotels, airlines, banks, and stores etc.  These required me to interact with FAQs, text bots, live chat, voice activated option bots (speaking/listening), and in most cases, I ended up 'communicating' in...

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Market Strategy

Message Decay

Andrew Penny, August 12 2025

Sometimes, the cause of falling revenue is obvious – a major client fails, a sales channel quits, input costs increase, a new competitor enters your market. But more often, the cause is really hard to pin down and it can be really frustrating. Far too often we leap to price (our competitor is undercutting us), or sales effort (let’s have a sales...

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Leadership & Management

Do You Think What You Think You Think?

Graham Birkenhead, April 1 2025

Back in high-school, one of the many books we had to read and discuss was 1984.  Two of the questions we were posed concerned: 'what would have to happen for the world described in that book to come about', and 'what would have to be true for people in that world to not realise what was happening to them'; remember those 2 questions as you read...

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Market Strategy

SEO is OVER

Andrew Penny, March 18 2025

Buyers are increasingly using AI to solve problems such as ‘How do I manage a sales funnel? How do I seal glass to aluminum? Where should I stay in Atlanta? They do this because they will get answers rather than a list of ‘sponsored’ web pages they could visit. And they typically get a prompt asking if they would like to know where they can buy...

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Communication

Marketing without Trust is Just Noise

Graham Birkenhead, March 11 2025

For as long as humans have been around, the ability to decide who to trust  - and who not to trust - has been a crucial part of our survival tool box.  Individually, we human beings are relatively weak creatures, but our strength comes from forming social groups, to work, problem solve, and live together.  And that requires communication and the...

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Leadership & Management

Business as Usual???

Andrew Penny, February 25 2025

There is absolutely no doubt that it won’t be Business as Usual for the next few years. And that could be a good thing!    Why? As the late great Montrealer Leonard Cohn famously said: “Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack in everything,That's how the light gets in.”

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Leadership & Management

The Fine Art of Not Saying Nothing

Graham Birkenhead, February 18 2025

Feedback is a crucial element in engineering and science, ensuring that systems function optimally within known boundaries. Thermostats regulate temperature by adjusting heating output. Vehicle cruise control maintains speed but adapts to other traffic. Biological feedback loops—such as homeostasis and insulin regulation—help the body stay in...

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Communication

Lead with your Inside Knee

Andrew Penny, January 21 2025

I spent a few days skiing at Mont Tremblant last week. The snow was perfect and the company excellent.  One of our group is a solid intermediate skier and always trying to improve. Unfortunately for him, the other three of us are all experienced ski instructors and only too keen to offer advice.  It seems that each of us had been quietly...

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Market Strategy

Doom Scrolling at Trade Shows Rots Your Mind

Andrew Penny, December 10 2024

The simple reality is that 99% of the attendees are not, and never will be, buyers – no matter how hard you try. Desperately trying to lure them in with free pens, gimmicks videos, magic shows and so on is simply a waste of time, money and energy. The harder you try the less likely it is that anyone will

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Leadership & Management

Forewarned is Forearmed

Graham, December 3 2024

The most common model for managing risk is what's known as the Ostrich Approach.  This appears to work reasonably well in many situations, and is based on 3 concepts fortuitously working together:

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