Innovation is usually the result of connections of past experience. But if you have the same experiences as everybody else, you’re unlikely to look in a different direction.Steve Jobs in Roger von Oech’s A Whack on the Side of the Head
Highly creative people don’t have special abilities. But, many of them naturally do what others have to train to do.
And, training to be creative begins with constant learning.
Successful brands are many things. To appeal to customers, organizations must be credible, with actions that are in alignment with their messaging. There must be no disconnection between what a brand promises and what it delivers.
A brand must be meaningful, with specific relevance to customers’ lives. Successful brands are unique, with a distinct identity in the marketplace. Successful brands are holistic, meeting customers’ needs on multiple levels. Successful brands are sustainable, engaged in business practices they can maintain over the long term.
Make purpose your bouncer.Priya Parker1
If you had 100% clarity, every decision would be obvious. How great would that be?
Although 100% clarity isn’t possible—none of us are oracles that can predict the future—it is possible to achieve much greater levels of clarity than your competitors because if your competitors are like most businesses, they’re operating in a light fog instead of clear air.
It seems obvious that you should hire managers that want to make the organization better. Yet, few organizations evaluate people based on their desire to serve the organization’s purpose.
This often results in a broken leadership system that is about self-promotion rather than the betterment of the organization and everyone the organization affects.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.Marilyn Strathern, “Improving Ratings” in European Review
In the face of the current complex business environment, most businesses strive to seek the simplified so that they can gain clarity and make effective decisions quickly.
It’s this desire that has produced flawed metrics like the Net Promoter Score (NPS)—a single measure that supposedly predicts business growth.1 Despite the desire, there is no holy grail metric: The original NPS study only verified past behavior, despite claims of being able to predict future behavior; and, there is enough evidence that should make any company hesitant to use it as an indicator.234
You’re a CEO—the leader of your enterprise. You aspire to continually guide your business to ever-greater growth and profitability.
Because you’re forward thinking, your eyes are set on a long-term vision. Although your board and your investors may demand continuous short-term, quarter-over-quarter improvements, you understand that making decisions to win only in the short term—when they’reat the expense of long-term relationship building—will damage your business. And as a CEO your main job is making effective decisions to help ensure the long-term sustainability of your enterprise.
Your memories are not created through your experiences, rather they are created through the stories you tell yourself and others about those experiences.
Joshua Medcalf, Chop Wood Carry Water
Inherent in a brand is the promise to solve a need.
Customers try brands because they believe they have the potential to consistently solve a problem they face: they have the potential to make life easier.
And he [Carl Jung] pretended, or told it in a way, as if she really had been on the moon and it had happened. And I was very rationalistically trained from school so I said indignantly, “But she imagined to be on the moon, or she dreamt it, but she wasn’t on the moon.” And he looked at me earnestly and said, “Yes she was on the moon.” Marie Louise von Franz, Matter of Heart
What we call something has more power than we realize.
It’s because words are more than just a group of symbols that just signify an object or idea: They go further than that to the point that they act as a stand in for that object or idea. In other words, they are a symbolic representation of the object or idea. And, symbols have great power because they act as a host of multiple meanings and layers of meanings within a single structure.
The symbolic power of words is why we choose the term Brand Lovers to refer to a company’s most passionate—and highest spending—customers.
