Tag: Culture

Motivation: Step 4 in building a purposeful culture

Reading Time: 3 minutes There’s a temptation to believe that the sheer logic of a good decision will sway the crowd; that if you make a good case and present it in an inspiring way, you’ve done everything you need to for that idea to gain instant uptake in an organisational culture. I’ve yet to see that happen successfully. […]

An unnatural state of work

Reading Time: < 1 minute It continues to fascinate me how little some businesses still seem to understand their human factors as opposed to their people model. They know how their workforce is organised. They understand where they’re allocated. They know what they cost. They have processes for everything they do. But they still seem to lack the anthropological understanding […]

Declaration: Step 5 in building a purposeful culture

Reading Time: 2 minutes At some point, a culture that is serious about what it intends must put those intentions in writing. That’s about a lot more than documentation. Declaring what you come to work for collectively amounts to a commitment. So many companies squander this opportunity in my view. They market what is happening rather than explaining it. […]

For brand’s sake, mind your language

Reading Time: 3 minutes Language is one of the most important definers of any organisational culture. The language you choose, the language you don’t choose and the language you choose to replace are a reflection, and in some senses, a definition of your priorities. As the American writer Rita Mae Brown once observed, “Language is the road map of […]

Continuation: Step 6 in building a purposeful culture

Reading Time: 3 minutes A culture with purpose doesn’t set and forget all the hard work that got it there in the first place. On the contrary, it continues to build and report on what it has established. Without that impetus, purpose quickly gives way to task and the commitment to deliver change is overtaken by the motivation to […]

Measuring purpose. The next key business imperative

Reading Time: 5 minutes In the first article in this series on purpose, we looked at the nature of purpose and espoused the view that purpose has two facets: functional (where it describes what the company must get done); and intentional (where it articulates what the company would like to see change in the wider world.) In this article, […]

Brand identity management: why someone will always want to be an exception

Reading Time: 4 minutes Pitch a new brand identity system to almost any large company with multiple divisions and inevitably someone will plead to be an exception to the new rules. This is particularly true where brands or divisions have had their own identity in the past. Attempts to consolidate a myriad of “brands” into a consistent brand identity […]

How purpose can drive change and innovation

Reading Time: 4 minutes Change has become a recognised game-changer for enlightened and progressive businesses. In this series we’ve attempted to define why Purpose and Profits should be linked and explained the importance of building a system to measure the impact Purpose has. In this post, we go further into the notion of Purpose as a catalyst for change.

What drives change – brand crisis or brand culture?

Reading Time: 4 minutes If you need to shift your culture from where it is to a different viewpoint and value set, is there any incentive for change without a crisis? Will a culture make changes on its own or do people need a fright in order to seriously disrupt business as usual?