Culture
The 99% Conference 2012 Recap: Thoughts and Sound Bites on Making Ideas Happen #99conf
Still vibrating from last week’s 99% Conference at the Times Center in New York. The experience was built to answer one question: how do you execute on your ideas? My overall impression was that the conference was even better than last year. The details, size, information, approachability of the attendees and speakers, and general vibe [...]
Please Give This Away: Anatomy of a Mission Statement (and how to write yours)
If you’re struggling to write a captivating mission statement or the one you have needs freshening up, this guide is for you. This has been one of the most popular corners of the website so I’m making it available again. And now it’s a totally frictionless download. Please download it and share it, pass the [...]
Buy a Book, Save a Life: An Interview with Michael Bungay Stanier
In case you hadn’t heard, today is End Malaria Day. I wanted to share with you an interview that I conducted with Michael Bungay Stanier, author of Do More Great Work and editor of a new collection of essays called End Malaria. The title refers to the book’s primary purpose: to sell mosquito nets. $20 of [...]
Concentrate on Your Message. The Medium will Take Care of Itself.
As the author, BLAST publisher, cubist painter, modernist, futurist, critic and rabblerouser Wyndham Lewis knew, it’s all about the application of your creativity and putting in the work. Concentrate on your message, worry less about the tools, just be creative and do it. The medium will reveal itself. Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen, [...]
Hiring is for Lovers: Designing Organizations for Creativity and Impact
The importance of building an exceptional team is sometimes minimized by creative business owners. It is a “secondary task” unrelated, at least superficially, to the work we deliver to clients, often triggered under duress by an event: a huge new client project to ramp up for, a round of VC funding, the opening of a [...]
It’s the End of Planning as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)
The death of strategic planning has been greatly exaggerated. But it’s true that we’re at a moment in time where top-down planning is less and less effective. Rather than set a plan and rigid parts to have others deliver on it, as a leader it’s more efficient to set strategic direction and then hand over [...]
Interview: charity: water’s Paull Young Talking Strategy and Teams
I met Paull Young when I had the opportunity to visit charity: water‘s offices for a studio talk during The 99% Conference. I was immediately taken with the power of the organization’s brand and depth of their commitment to solving the world’s water crisis, and also with Paull’s affable style and considerable expertise. I knew [...]
Ideas are Like Orphans: What I learned from the 99% Conference
The 99% Conference is all about one thing. Turning those ideas clunking around your tired skull into action. (Your skull is tired because you don’t get enough sleep! Just ask 99% speaker and metaphoric sprinter Tony Schwartz.) That one message, a seemingly simple morsel, was hammered home in dozens of ways, all very convincing. (All [...]
7 Valuable Non Sequiturs from SXSW Interactive
I attended SXSW Interactive for the first time in 2011. The last time I was in Austin was 15 years ago. It’s an understatement to say that the conference and city have changed. If I were to summarize the experience in ‘11 in one word it would be “tacos”. That or “overwhelming”. So many people. [...]
Keys to building a subculture now (not just a culture)
When it comes to your business your whole thing is about making your clients and customers into raving fans. That way they can do the work of spreading your message far and wide. A good brand always starts internally, and when we begin the conversation about you and your internal people, we’re talking company culture. [...]
