A Social Contract For The Holidays
A social contract is, by definition, up to all of us. Those of you with kids you know the situation. The daycare is closing, you white knuckle it during rush hour to pick them up (Why does my boss insist on dropping stuff on me late in the day! A 3:00 email about that—really?). You’re not the only working professional struggling to get there on time. You arrive to a line of idling cars, tensions can be high. Think about it from the daycare side for a moment. Late pickups have costs. Overtime for the staff, delayed hours for the janitorial crew, tired…
Not the viral you were hoping for
Don't you love the surveys like this one that pit congress approval ratings against things like lice and (worse) replacement refs? (Congress looses in a landslide in case you were wondering. You may now thank me for not using the phrase "Spoiler alert.") They're funny because they use the device of surprise. When you say something unexpected or place an element outside its usual context it makes us uncomfortable or jarred, and we laugh. The other response to an unexpected element is revulsion. Like the way a body works to expel a virus. It’s working against the system. It doesn’t…
As Branding Dies Leaders Rise
Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion. It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage. Branding started as a notion of…