Re:Focus

7 Cities in 10 Days

I just got back from an amazing speaking tour across Europe and a stop in North Africa.  I met some amazing businessmen who live their Why and have built businesses around it.  They do amazing things to help ensure that their purpose and cause stays clear in their companies.  Like the CEO in Zürich who always offers new employees less money than their previous job to learn if they are joining his company for the right reasons.  Or the CEO in Lisbon who doesn't have a corporate vision, he manages his corporate destiny.  I met a CEO in Madrid who thanks the bankruptcy he went through for the success he now enjoys and a business owner in Casablanca who was left a lucrative job on Wall Street to pursue his passion.

I'll share their stories and more this week.

Until then, I thought I'd share a little bit of the personal experience I had.

Enjoy...

 

Finding Insights in Trends

If you're interested in tracking the trends that are reshaping business and our culture, then you already know about PSFK.  They are one of the leading trend spotting groups in the world.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently had the honor of sitting on a panel at the PSFK trends summit in NYC.  I joined Steve Hardwick, president of one of the hottest ad agencies in the world - StrawberryFrog and Grant McCracken, former teacher at Harvard Business School and renowned anthropologist, to  discuss  how to turn  trends into actionable insights.  The panel was chaired by Florian Peter, a brilliant trend spotter in his own right.

If you'd like to see our discussion, I've posted it below.  Just click the PSFK logo.

The Golden Circle Seminar

I was privileged to speak to some of the brightest entrepreneurs in New York at the monthly meeting of the New York chapter of EO.

As is my style, I don't like to simply lecture - it tends not to be very actionable for those in the audience.  And everyone who knows me knows I prefer action over theory.

The following is the audio file from my workshop with EO NY.  I've edited nothing except for my introduction at the beginning, so you can hear exactly what these companies will do to  enhance their marketing.  Though the companies did many different things - the issues they face are similar to most marketers out there,  big or small.

I showed the group the Golden Circle - a road map to developing communication in a way that directly influences  human decision making and purchase behavior.  In this session we applied the Golden Circle to marketing materials, but it has application in corporate culture, internal communications, product development and even operations.

I'll write more about the Golden Circle soon and how I've been perfecting the model with the world renowned neuroscientist Dr. Peter Whybrow.  The whole idea of the Golden Circle is that it guides a company to communicate based on how our brains receive information, process it and make a decision accordingly.  Fascinating stuff to say the least.

Enjoy.

MP3 File