Motivational leadership: from knowing you’re shit to knowing your shit

I was asked this week for my thoughts on leadership styles and how to get the best out of a team. Given the challenging times in which we live, I thought I would share some of the guiding principles and lessons I have learned over many years of developing high-performance product and marketing teams. Being …

Customer Experience: Turning good intentions into great execution

For quite a while, I’ve been intending to write about motivation and customer experience, but never quite got to it. Why write now? More on that later. With customer experience, there has been much research that has highlighted a mismatch between what companies believe they deliver and what customers think they get. And other research …

The machine translation debate: enough is enough

How many experts over the years have proclaimed that, because of the latest advances, the time has now arrived to invest in MT? Full disclosure… I include myself in this, as I launched SDL’s integrated MT solution nearly ten years ago. And it’s still happening today, as Lingo24’s recent press release highlights. How many times have …

To reach and react: why mobile and social are so disruptive

Although I would argue that the pace of change is maybe not as fast as some would have us believe, there is no doubt that there are significant disruptive forces at work in the shape of mobile and social. They are disruptive because they are game changers in your ability to reach, and react to, …

The pace of change is accelerating! Or is it?

How often have you been in a presentation which begins with something like, “The pace of change is accelerating” or similar? I was at the keynote by Google at Technology for Marketing and Advertising last week, and this was one of the key points. But is this really true? When you have as many grey …

Strategy, planning and motivations

Check out this Harvard Business Review blog post and all the comments. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/dont_let_strategy_become_plann.html A very interesting collection of thoughts, from which you can deduce that strategy is probably the most over-used word in business, while also being the most misused and misunderstood. I have found that by critically examining the motivations of your business, your customers …