Entries by Matt Wright

Digital Remit Book of the Month: Cultural issues under the Kaleidoscope

Digital Remit: Book of the Month

The Cross-Cultural Coaching Kaleidoscope, by Jennifer Plaister-Ten

“M&A is a mug’s game: typically 70 to 90% of mergers are abysmal failures”

Harvard Business Review

Cultural issues are one of the biggest reasons for M&A failure, with deals far likely to succeed if these issues are addressed early on; e.g. the KLM/Air France merger is frequently cited as a positive study in how to ‘do M&A well’.

Jenny’s book began life as a Masters’ dissertation, and so is full of research and practical input from coaches around the world who work on the issue of ‘culture’ on a daily basis. read more

March 5, 2017 /0 Comments/by
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Don’t judge a book by its cover…

“Waterstones has crept in under the guise of a nice, independent book store, which it simply isn’t. Ultimately it’s the dishonesty I really dislike”

At a time when business rates are due to soar (sorry, ‘phased in nicely over the next five years’!), there is a great deal of sympathy out there for the independent High Street shops, who are struggling to survive against the onslaught of online retailing (for whom rates are forecast to decline…but that’s a blog for another day!)

So, the notion of national chains masquerading as independents to curry sympathy with shoppers is viewed with some distaste. read more

March 3, 2017 /0 Comments/by
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Motivational Speaking: Leading from Behind

On 23rd February, Capgemini held its Core Services Kick Off 2017 Conference in central London, and invited Alan Chambers along to give the keynote speech.

Alan is an ex-Royal Marine and a renowned polar explorer, who has been organising expeditions to the most inhospitable places on earth for the past 20 years.

Capgemini had 3 important messages to put across, and so Alan was well-placed to discuss these in the context of his recent expedition to the North Pole. read more

February 25, 2017 /0 Comments/by
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LinkedIn Tips: ’15 Tips for Compelling Company Updates’…..condensed down to 3 in real life.

LinkedIn is full of useful tips. At least that’s what LinkedIn always claims….but how many LinkedIn tips are really that useful? 

15 Tips for Compelling Company Updates on LinkedIn from LinkedIn

Having watched the video and read through all the slides (please feel free to do so yourself!), it might be time-saving to read my 3 summary points below first?

1.Think what YOU would like as a reader

  • Short, snappy titles; i.e. like newspaper headlines
  • Don’t give everything away – leave something to the imagination….but don’t lie
  • Concise introduction
    • ‘Tip #4 Ask Thoughtful Questions‘….or in other words, appeal to their emotions [See: related article below]

    Clear Call to Action

    • ‘Tip #7 Make your content Snackable and Valuable’– which is just another way of saying everything we’ve said above already !

    Related article

    Open questions – why do they work and when do they work best?

    2. Include images, graphics, or video

    • Quite easy if you’re pasting a link to a published blog = include the URL and the featured image (assuming you’ve loaded one on your blog!) shows up automatically
    • Hyperlinks – apparently “drives x2 the engagement” (LinkedIn’s words….not mine)
    • Links to YouTube – “results in 75% higher share” (please assume from now on that anything in quotation marks refers to LinkedIn!)

    3. Know & engage with your audience

    • Don’t “hypertarget” (this is another LinkedIn phrase I hasten to add!)….in other words, don’t make your article too specialist
    • Reply to any comments (commonsense I would have thought?)
    • Test what works best with your audience (the ones that are read most?!)

    Related article

    5 tips for how to write like you’re having a conversation….rather than a presentation

    That’s it in a nutshell read more

February 18, 2017 /0 Comments/by

There are only 6 story types in the world…

There may be hundreds of thousands of books written, but they can all be reduced to one of just six possible story types:

  • Rags to riches – where a lead character triumphs over early diversity; e.g. Oliver Twist
  • Riches to rags – where a once lucky lead character then falls on hard times; e.g. King Lear
  • Man in a hole – where a protagonist finds himself in a difficult spot before getting out of it; e.g. Moby Dick
  • Icarus – where characters rise before a spectacular fall
  • Cinderella – where the character’s fortunes rise, fall, then rise again
  • Oedipus – when the character falls, rises, then falls

-Source: Daily Telegraph 26 Nov-16

At least that’s according to a recent study by the University of Vermont, who electronically analysed over 1,700 books and discovered these six common themes.

The research was inspired by Kurt Vonnegut (author of Slaughterhouse 5), who originally proposed the similarity of emotional story lines in a Masters thesis which was subsequently rejected by the University of Chicago. Strange how these things come around again, eh? read more

February 8, 2017 /0 Comments/by

5 tips for how to write more efficiently…using modular writing

Modular writing (to me) represents structuring articles or reports in such a way that the content is easily arranged so that it can added to, edited, or reused as necessary.

Here are 5 of my tips for efficient modular writing: 

1. Shout-out quotes can double as tweets

  • Shout-out quotes (or pull quotes, or lift-outs) are key phrases, quotations, or excepts, that have been pulled from the main body of the article, and are typeset differently in order to stand out.
  • Because, by nature, they are short in length but are legible when viewed on their own, they can double as tweets (for Twitter)
  • Hence, the rest of the of article can then be attached as a weblink to the tweet(s)

2. Header introduction doubles as online teaser

  • Many publications lead with the online piece, and then follow on at a later date with the published piece
  • The header introduction to the article can summarise the 5 W‘s (what, why, who, where, when), in the same way that a newspaper column would do
  • The article can then subsequently expand upon all of these points

3. Executive summary sets the tone read more

February 8, 2017 /0 Comments/by

5 tips for how to write like you’re having a conversation….rather than a presentation

The conversational tone is the hallmark of good copywriting, because it reads like somebody is talking to you….and that makes you engage, makes you trust, makes you a potential customer. 

You have to relax, write what you write. It sounds easy but it’s really, really hard. 

– Diana Setterfield

So, stop thinking so hard, and use these 5 tips, taken from around the web, to help with your conversational writing:

1. Tone: Imagine your ideal reader, and write in their voice

Writing to a crowd kills your voice.

Human beings are naturally compelled by stories. Stories appeal to personal emotions and engage sensory triggers. Turn your facts and figures into stories and you’ll notice a significant improvement in your time on site.

Example:

“Our company’s mission is to provide everyone in the world with healthy and nutritional fruit based breakfast that contains low-fat and low-sugar.” read more read more

February 8, 2017 /4 Comments/by

Comedy and Leadership – discuss?

How do you define funny? How do you define Peter Cook? Or are the two words synonymous….?

It’s quite impossible to think of Peter as dead because he’s a perpetual spirit

-Barry Humphries

  • Cook the insulter – “Perhaps if I had been born with a club foot and a height problem, I might have been as desperate as Dudley to become a star . . . “
  • Cook the foul mouth – whilst everybody else avoided the ‘c word’, Cook embraced it like a long lost friend
  • Cook the sport nut – inventing a ball game called ‘Los Bollockos’ in a swimming pool whilst filming abroad

Even after his death, Cook managed to be hilariously off-the-wall….or ‘on-the-wall’ if you read this particular obituary:

THE hall is narrow and the visitor’s eye is drawn to distant chaos, so it is easy to miss the faded scribblings on the wall. Somebody has circled the reddish-brown blotch of a squashed insect and captioned it “fly”. In the same hand, with the same felt-tip, is the word “virgin”, surmounted by a doodle like the top of a palm tree. A line of arrows marches down the wall from the virgin and disappears round the corner, where the joke ends: “Not much chance here, mate. Try No 23.” read more read more

January 23, 2017 /0 Comments/by

BLT: Stretchability – are you the best judge of how far you can stretch?

“If you’re not growing, you’re slowing”

1. Introductions and brain loosener

The OED 2016 Word of the Year was post-truth – what might the 2017 Word of the Year be? Suggestions from around the table included:

  • BREXIT
  • Trump
  • Shift
  • Optimism
  • Uncertainty
  • Shake up
  • Article 50
  • Navel gazing

So, it’s fair to say that BREXIT and Trump monopolised the thinking, as indeed they had been doing for most of 2016!

2. The Stretchability Challenge

The second part of the group discussion was about 2016 challenges undertaken, both personal and business, which had ‘stretched’ individuals, and how they had learnt from their successes/mistakes. read more

January 19, 2017 /1 Comment/by