Leadership Archives - Three Over Four

29Jul 2022 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Rebranding is Change Leadership

Branding, Leadership, Three Over Four Approach

How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: One to do it, and another to tell everyone how they would have done it better. Marketers are like guitarists in this way. We just love to amp up our outrage anytime there's a high visibility rebrand (even if they work out just fine most of the time). It's a passtime of ours, really. In my first column for Inc.com (here's all three I've written for them) I use this as a vector for discussing one dimension of leadership's relationship with marketing: Branding and rebranding is mostly about leadership because leading an organization's identity change is actually a complex and sophisticated exercise in leadership, challenging for the most seasoned leaders let alone marketers without any leadership training. So without…

24May 2019 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Three Over Four on the Innovative Agency Podcast

Leadership, Three Over Four Approach

Had the pleasure of having a dialog with the Innovative Agency podcast last week. We talked about leadership, marketing, and the Three Over Four approach to building trust with clients and within the marketing industry in general. Check it out here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/32-why-trust-is-important-in-marketing-how-leadership/id1419747902?i=1000439001014

10Aug 2018 by Aaron Templer No Comments

A Professional Services Marketing Approach That Might Surprise You

Leadership, Professional Services Marketing, Three Over Four Approach

It was a privilege to deliver a Professional Services Marketing course at the Chicago headquarters of the American Marketing Association recently, and I’m really stoked to boil it down for a presentation at a Michiana American Marketing Association event next week. Professional services continues to be an important market segment for Three Over Four, and as we all know: if you truly want to solidify a concept or area of expertise, understanding it well enough to convey it to others is great way to get there. These engagements are great opportunities to share value and also return it to our clients. A funny thing happened along the way. I’ve come to realize that what drives effective professional services marketing isn’t marketing at all. It’s leadership. That’s a weird claim. There…

15Nov 2017 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Emotional Influence

Leadership, Three Over Four Approach

Thought leadership of Leading through Challenging Times focuses on emotional intelligence. Want to influence through tough times? Learn to manage emotions. Three Over Four does lead gen and content marketing for the Executive Education unit at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. One of the great things about this client, beside their concise name, is that we get to learn. It’s a 24-7-365 class proxy of some incredible content tailored specifically for working professionals. And their orientation around leadership aligns perfectly with our strengths. So it’s a good fit for both of us. This month we’re creating content around a leadership topic relevant to just about all of us: Empower to Perform: Leadership strategies for empowering people to rise up to business challenges. We interviewed Mark Gasta, former…

12Feb 2013 by Aaron Templer

Practice helps understand influence

Leadership, Three Over Four Approach

To the creative process, practice is critical. I've long been intrigued by the notion that artists (like athletes) spend 95% percent of their time practicing to execute well in the remaining 5% of their time. In business, it’s the opposite. There’s very little practice time in business, and we’re expected to execute all the time. There’s the occasional executive business program, leadership retreat, coaching session, or sabbatical. But those are rare, and some working professionals may never have the chance at any of those perks. There are many ways to practice and many techniques go in to practicing for various outcomes. This post from FastCompany Design got me thinking. Maybe we should talk more concretely about practice. Take a look at more specific examples of how practice helps the artistic…

12Jan 2013 by Aaron Templer

Extraordinary expectations. Or none at all. Whatever.

Branding, Leadership, Three Over Four Approach

[caption id="attachment_2629" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="So do not care."][/caption] I play percussion for a South Asian dance troupe. Many of the dancers are young women with such high energy and expressions of optimism and glee that it's as if their life is accompanied by abundant exclamation points and OMG's hanging over their heads wherever they go. Sometimes I'll walk into a practice studio or a room filled with these dancers and their energy hits me like I've splashed down at the end of a water ride into a sparkly-pink, fruity perfume pool. It's taken some getting used to. I thought of this when I read Kevin Kelly's interesting piece about Extraordinary (clipped in this Farnam Street Blog post, where I found it). The gist: Because we are exposed so regularly and…

25Feb 2011 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Apologizing when you’re Groupon, Rep. Lynn Jenkins, or Married

Leadership

If you feel like you need to apologize more in your life, here are three suggestions. 1) Hold a public office 2) Run a Super Bowl ad 3) Get married I’ve never held a public office and I’ve never run a Super Bowl ad. This would make me, you might suggest, exceptionally unqualified to offer an opinion about how to apologize following a gaffe in either position. I am married though. And I apologize quite a bit. Given the success rate of these apologies I suppose I’m even less qualified to give advice from that position. So I figure why not opine on the first two? (more…)

14Oct 2010 by Aaron Templer 1 Comment

A few ways to stop intellectual load shedding

Leadership, Marketing

There are many places in the world that have regular “load shedding,” or rolling blackouts. It’s a fact of daily life. When I travel with my wife and in-laws to India, we stay in a small townhouse in Nashik, Maharashtra. Load shedding is as much a part of our daily planning as what we need to get at market. It effects shower schedules (water is heated by an individual, portable “geyser” that runs on electricity), which cascades into breakfast schedules, which cascades into when we can leave the house, which cascades into when we’ll be able to meet with a visiting relative, which cascades into where we need to be for lunch (the main meal of the day), which inevitably bumps into the next scheduled load shedding. (more…)