Skry being right on the money: Still those web pages about me being a Google SEO expert or having an algorithm named for me are being indexed and prioritized by Google, all because Semrush hallucinated (or was there a malicious hand in this?), told a bunch of people (in south Asia, predominantly) about […]
Category: leadership
Leadership, management and commerce.
You never know where your interests will take you
A seven-year-old needs to figure this out: what would the Ford Escort Popular Plus be priced at if were assembled in Aotearoa? Amanda and I were chatting about prodigies. Some young people are amazing, doing uni classes at intermediate or high-school age, or playing piano like Mozart, and while not all of us have […]
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Hellos and goodbyes
Twenty twenty-three, what a year. I’ve met some amazing people this year, a lot of whom are in the public service. You know who you are. I am happy to know you. Those who champion the good in our society. Those who offer alternatives to things that harm society. Those who create good in this […]
Most of HR isn’t about finding the right candidate
A friend in the UK recently told me: I read how companies say they cannot find anyone to fill their roles, and I have a bunch of very talented, highly qualified friends who are out of work who can’t find anything. Having looked into this locally, it’s far from being a strictly UK problem. I […]
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Forget the “shoulds”
My Lucire interview with Bay Area designer Devan Gregori has gone online—it’ll likely appear in print afterwards with different visuals. Devan has a wonderful story about how she came to be a fashion designer, and it’s very different to those who fell into the trade through a childhood interest or watching their grandmother sew. I […]
‘Fake it till you make it’ isn’t a legal doctrine
Some say, ‘Fake it till you make it,’ as a positive thing. In fact, a very dear friend used to say it, and it did him a lot of good. But then, he’s an honest sort of chap and he never promised something he couldn’t deliver. His take on faking it was to present a […]
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States of play for Facebook, Linkedin and OnlyKlans
Over a decade ago, I watched as Facebook intentionally broke organic reach and Lucire’s plummeted 90 per cent overnight. It was clear what Zuckerberg’s grift was: to get us to pay to boost posts. But there was already, back then, plenty of reasons you shouldn’t: it was buggy as heck. Fast forward to 2014 and […]
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There’s only one rebrand I care about today
One thing that marketing teaches you is that you need to have a market orientation: put yourselves in the shoes of the consumer and figure out what they want, rather than force something on them. And one thing that leadership teaches you is owning up to when you’ve got it wrong, and making the necessary […]
Personal thoughts about my friend, Merrill J. Fernando
Above: Amanda and me with Merrill in 2016. I was saddened to learn of the passing of my friend Merrill J. Fernando, founder of Dilmah Tea and the MJF Foundation. I’ve written an obit over at Lucire, since he was very much a friend of the magazine, too, and his values of social responsibility […]
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We’re past the sort of digital marketing that some seek: the mid-’20s are about integrated marcom again
When I first started working, there was a profession called corporate identity. It wasn’t called branding. I noticed the vernacular change in the 1990s, more so in the early 2000s when even Wally Olins started using it more to describe what Wolff Olins did. You just have to follow the market. We’re at a point […]