To understand the man you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty. Napoleon I turned twenty on 17th March 1986. Two days later the Bank Of England dropped its base lending rate by one whole percentage point from 12.375% to 11.375%. From …
I don’t know what age I was when this happened. I hope I was young enough for my disgusting behaviour and my naivety to be excusable. I was in a gang called the PVK. The V and the K make it sound like an Uzbek paramilitary organisation but we were …
Three sister agencies were merged into a single agency called Signal. And it fell to me to define the values of the merged entity. The output of that process is contained in the Slideshare file embedded below. It is designed to be self-explanatory and easy to digest. The output reflects …
You are a coffee farmer in Uganda. You till the soil on your patch of mountain with your spouse. You have three children and a dependent grandparent to support. You have a roof over your head and, to all intents and purposes, you are self-sufficient for food. You are …
You won’t find any climate change deniers on the mountains of Uganda. Thirsty coffee trees don’t do fake news. Nor does broccoli. When the rain fell too heavily on the plains of Spain in December 2016, washing away entire crops, broccoli and other vegetables disappeared from British supermarket shelves. Prices …
JWT25, the deliberately youthful and deludedly agile content production start-up from JWT Singapore, is stupidly ageist in my relatively senile opinion. Here is the agency’s pitch according to The Drum. JWT has launched a new service called JWT25 which uses young content creators to focus on short content made quickly. …
Every organisation has “machinery”. It’s a legacy combination of structure, culture and process. New technology and old machinery are seldom a good match. Technology vs machinery.
Workshops seem to be the answer, no matter what the question is. Remember when acid rain was the poster child of environmental damage? Along with the hole in the ozone layer it seems almost quaint now in the context of climate change. Time does that. Time is less of a …
I don’t have a problem with C-words in job titles, even though there are too many Chiefs these days. You can be the Chief of pretty much anything it seems. CEO, CFO, CIO, CMO, COO, CRO, CSO, CTO, C3PO. But I shudder inside when I hear the C-phrase. I get …
Pete Townshend stole his trademark arm swing from Keith Richards. And Andrew Oldham cut the Rolling Stones from six members to five, not for an musical reasons, but to improve their aesthetic and their memorability. Here are three extraordinary passages from an extraordinary book; Stoned by Andrew Loog Oldham. Firstly …
