Welcome to My Blog
Top Tips for Hiring Managers
Like many thousands (maybe even millions) of others, I have spent much of this year job hunting. And I have to say, in my long and varied career I have never known a job [...]
Bad job interviews and lessons from the pitch process
I want to share a tale of a terrible job interview, as it made me think about how badly structured so many interviews are, and how applying some of the best-practice from the agency [...]
How can agencies work better with their marketing clients?
I recently had the pleasure of chatting to Jenny Plant, host of the Creative Agency Account Manager podcast, about the working relationship between agency account managers and clients. As a Marketing Director who’s also [...]
Twenty lessons from 2020: Finding our new normal
My last four blogs have looked at the lessons we can learn from 2020, focusing on Marketing, Business, The Economy and Society. What's very clear is that thousands of people, and hundreds of businesses, [...]
Twenty lessons from 2020 – Part Four: Society
Following the first three parts of my 20 Lessons from 2020 - on marketing, business and the economy – part four is a slightly longer read, and looks at lessons 15 through 20, what we can learn from society. The [...]
Twenty lessons from 2020 – Part Three: The Economy
The first two instalments of my 20 Lessons from 2020 looked at marketing and business. This piece focuses on the lessons we can learn from the changes to our economy, highlighting three of the [...]
Twenty lesson from 2020 – Part Two: Business
Following on from Part One, Lessons from Marketing, the second instalment of my 20 Lessons from 2020 takes a look at the business world. 7. Flexible Working For many, this is the Covid silver-lining. [...]
Twenty lessons from 2020 – Part One: Marketing
Well here we are, the start of a brand new year, although for many of us the only evident change is the number on the bathroom scales… Ever the optimist, I wanted to look back [...]
Flexible working needs top-down change
For any good manager, it will be obvious why adopting surveillance software to track an employee’s ‘productivity’ when they’re working remotely is a bad idea. Whilst it clearly highlights a wider issue of trust [...]
Dear Rishi Sunak… An Open Letter
Back in April, when you announced that the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) was being extended to include the salaries – but not dividends - of sole director companies, many of us were relieved [...]
The inconvenient truths
I recently watched a programme where a group of obese people shared their stories and sought to understand each other’s points of view whilst staying together in a house. Amongst the group was a [...]
Authentic brand purpose? You bet it is
Gillette launched their new ‘The Best a Man Can be’ campaign yesterday and it’s brave and brilliant. Some have criticised the marketing wisdom of this and the overt display of ‘brand purpose’. It’s fair to [...]