ARTICLES
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...
Speak Like a Leader – PS Programmes’ IoD Masterclass
The PS Programmes team recently delivered a masterclass titled ‘Speak Like a Leader’ for members of the Institute of Directors, at the IoD’s Pall Mall address in London. As it’s always a good way to engage an audience, and find out what it is that they expect from a...
BA: a high-vis fracas
It’s long been the habit of this blog to seize upon a big news story and dissect the PR surrounding it: Deepwater Horizon, Alton Towers, Samsung, Hotpoint, you name it, we’ve chucked in our two cents. And the latest showstopper – British Airways falling foul of a...
The butterfly effect: United Airlines in a flap
It's sometimes a challenge to work out the level at which we pitch our advice. Some clients are experienced media performers who want to step up a level. Others really need the basic building blocks to help them understand the fundamentals of communications. I wonder,...
Fake news! Beware the wisdom of crowds
If you ask a thousand people to guess the weight of an Easter egg, the average mean guess will be very close to correct. But answers to some questions aren't so easy to fact check, and sometimes we only get the answers we want to hear. If you Google 'NASA moon...