Three + 1

[this is an old post. I’m making slow adjustments to the site, some pages may not work. d.]

1. It is hard to get back into writing in a blog fashion when a: there is so much to do, read and be part of. So once again, I’ll try to blend on this blog, the thinking, interests and other forms of authorship that are taking me away from noting it down here.

2. This has to be the year where social enterprise / Good Business takes a giant step to no longer being the outsider to big-company industry but instead being embraced as part of the DNA and helping business performance for the long-term. This year’s Social Capitalist Award winners are organizations with a big vision, big ideas and big positive impact, as opposed to many industry leaders with a murky vision, small ideas and a big detrimental impact on community and the environment. So many companies are beginning to redesign themselves from the inside out, learning from these Award winners and success stories elsewhere. I’m going to pay close attention to the influencers and those they influence this year.

3. After a long hiatus in where I grew to dislike the topic of brand, I found a corner of it I am indeed passionate about brand. For me, Business Behaviour is the key to building a strong brand, in where a company figures out what it is all about, why it does what it does and the way in which it is going to do it. I find small start-ups/companies incredibly inspirational when they are very clear about who they are and what they do for their customers, and in that there is a lot a very large organization can learn from. The Flickrs, Coudal Partners, Howies and Cliff Bars of the world are poster children for behaving the way they wish to be treated and understood. They design a business in the vision of how they see the world, designing and delivering services and products to their customers in the way they wish to behave, creating very distinctive, memorable and seductive (in a good way) experiences. And luckily for us, they’re designing their businesses from scratch, to be socially responsible and good for all of us. So figuring out who you are, what you want to be and the way in which you want to conduct business, is my key interest in brand this year. Spending time in Asia working with very large companies on this topic is a good test for some of the observations I’ve made in the start-ups I watch.

Plus 1. I apologize for the predictive nature of this post - but this also has to be the year where we see some new development in the publishing industry where a convergence of media and how people consume magazines online and off. I’m an avid collector of magazines, primarily to read them and this year I’m going to rekindle the past by looking into ‘Some Kind of Media Thing’. This channels a keen interest and hopefully will be a fruitful collaboration. There’s a lot to learn from various experiments and research, including the Institute for the Future of the Book and Tyler Brule’s upcoming Monocle. The technology is all there, hopefully we’ll get to see some inviting and inspiring new uses of it.

Because I wrote this in the very useful WriteRoom this post doesn’t contain hyperlinks. I’ll add them in later.

Happy New Year.

2007-01-20 + plink