ARTICLES
Droning home for Christmas
If your family is driving you crazy at Christmas, spare a thought for those whose travel plans have been disrupted by the drone incident at Gatwick Airport. Here are the numbers at the time of writing this... Over 1,000 flights cancelledAirport shut down three times...
Crisis communications – because saying nothing is not an option!
Donald Trump has made many of us in the communications business shift uncomfortably in our seats in the last couple of years. When Trump became President, he pretty much took the standard advice of the speaker coach, screwed it up, and threw it back in our faces: be...
Kofi A. Annan – ‘An African at heart, but a global citizen, symbolising the best of humanity’.
Recently, the world lost Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General. I along with many others was saddened to hear the news of Kofi Annan’s death and felt extremely lucky to have met the great man - the ultimate diplomat. I interviewed him on a couple of...
How to…Speak to a parliamentary select committee
Though some of us will have seen the bawdy Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday at 12 noon, a lot of parliament’s work is done in select committees. A select committee is made up of a number of members of parliament, and deals with particular issues relating to...
Trusted Savings Bank?
Imagine opening the banking app on your phone and looking at the balance. It seems surprisingly high. You look more closely, and don’t recognise the recent transactions. Then you see the name: it is not your account. When you’re sorting out whether you feel the thrill...
The Business Book Awards 2018
At last week’s inaugural Business Book Awards ceremony in Central London, Lucy McCarraher said in her welcoming speech that she had set up the awards in partnership with Thinkfest, in response to changes in the business book market: ‘Business books themselves have...
Kentucky Fried Crisis
We have three golden principles when it comes to communication: authority, authenticity and audience. Usually, we apply them to speaking in public and giving presentations – but they work well across other communications as well. Forget about where you put your feet...
Big Sister – What reality television tells us about surviving hostile interviews
Women are ‘in’ which comes as a shock to those of us who never realised we were ‘out’. ‘Feminism’ is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Word of 2017. And the women who have broken their silence over sexual harassment are Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’. From the...
How to write books and influence people
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even packs of chimpanzees do it. And we do it - sometimes. Sharing knowledge is what holds a community together, whether that’s warning of predators, advertising food sources or playing a game. When humans share knowledge, we codify and...
‘What AI means for leaders’
Automation has already touched every industry on the planet: whether it's sorting the rotten apples out of a harvest or customers scanning their own shopping at a supermarket checkout, machines are deeply entwined in our lives, whether we notice them or not. It's...