This Week's Cartoon

culture of new ideas

I was struck by this recent observation from Timothy Clark in his HBR article on cultivating “Intellectual Bravery”: “Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy… Read More

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Most Recent Cartoons

marketing beyond cookies

Marketers are bracing for the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022. As Andrew Tu, APAC MD of OpenX, recently put it: “The upcoming death of the cookie is set up to be the defining issue of digital advertising over the next 12 months.” The writing has… Read More

we’re going agile

Next month marks the 20th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Twenty years ago, 17 software engineers went skiing in Utah. After bonding over their shared frustrations on the state of software development, they drafted the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The principles they defined helped change software development forever, but also inspired more widespread organizational shifts. As the signers… Read More

creating personas

Marketers use personas as a tool to try to bring customers into the room — to help organizations be more customer-centric. They’re intended to help with everything from innovation to experience design to marketing and sales. At their best, personas can help visualize and communicate insights from research. But at their worst, they have nothing to do with the real… Read More

consumer privacy comeback

In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg famously said that privacy was no longer a “social norm.” New research this month showed that 94% of consumers are uncomfortable with how their personal data is shared online. Drew MacRae at the Financial Rights Legal Centre, said consumers’ expectations had fundamentally shifted. As he put it: “Privacy is making a comeback. People are slowly realizing… Read More

brand purpose marketing

“If being purposeful means doing ads to you, then you’re probably doing it wrong.” I was struck by this observation from the ever-insightful Tom Roach in his essay exploring whether brand purpose is “the biggest lie the ad industry ever told.” The topic of brand purpose has always inspired some of the most absurd BS in marketing. Last week, Mondelez… Read More

how to do strategic planning

Traditional strategic planning is often neither “strategic” nor much of a “plan”. It usually resembles a peace treaty more than clear marching orders for an organization. Strategic planning also tends to be out-dated the moment it’s written. I like this characterization from consultant Richard Gold: “Traditionally, strategic planning has been a hierarchical, top-down process where someone in the organization… Read More