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One of the projects I cared most about was a massive flop.

I called it the User Shoes program, a way for me and my fellow product managers to visit consumers in their homes each month. 

It was ethnographic-research lite, where the objective was to expand our perspective by seeing how real people were using our products in the real world.

Knowing the corporate politics of the situation, I invited our sister brand to include a team member in the pilot program. 

What a mistake.

She came. She s...

Typing rather than talking changes behaviour.

Customers are more willing to buy, for example, when they type their search rather than use a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa.

When we type, we subconsciously associate it with taking action.

When we use a voice assistant, we instead associate it with gathering information and deliberating.

Unfortunately, customers are unlikely to tell you they decided to buy because they typed rather than talked. They can’t.

They won’t imagine it’s possi...

Baby birds open their beaks for two reasons. 

They trust their parent and it’s worth it. They get fed.

Customers and colleagues open your emails for the same reasons.

See: The Little Book of Letters and Emails

My word for the year is different.

Or to put it a better way, different is my word for the year.

It’s been remarkably clarifying.

From taking a different path when walking the dog to changing parts of my website and taking on different projects, reminding myself to be ‘different’ has been powerful.

It’s helped me unshackle from my status quo.

I’m even writing differently. Have you noticed?

Looser. More conversational.

And in the spirit of that, I’m going to experiment with how often I ...

You already know there are employees you are not getting the best out of.

What may surprise you is it’s not the lazy ones. It’s not the shirkers. The ‘all talk no walk’ types. You probably have a plan for them, or you should.

No, I’m talking about those conscientious, hard working members of your organisation that are doing good work, but they could be doing GREAT work. 

👉  These are your 60% employees.

I know this because I was a 60% employee. 

Before I started my business back in 2011,...

I was updating my LinkedIn profile and was given the option for AI to rewrite it.

You’ve probably seen these AI integrations across a number of different platforms?

And to my delight, AI did an excellent job.

It covered all bases and flowed really nicely. (You can read for yourself it at the bottom of this post).

So I pressed publish.

But then I started to wonder, what is the point of my profile?

What am I trying to communicate BEYOND the words?

Because there were two problems with how...

There are seven words I guarantee you, your customers, and your boss will love. 

👉 👉👉 There is nothing you need to do.

Here's an example.

A few weeks ago I received an email from my website host Kajabi.

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"Hello Bri,

You may have heard about the new email requirements for bulk senders starting February 4, 2024. Yahoo and Gmail have separately announced updated requirements to deliver email to their platforms. Their goal is to better secure customers' inboxes and provide an improved co...

⬆ ⬆ ⬆ ⬆

Surprisingly, this is the type of comment I love.

"Surely this only works on idiots?" 😲

The comment was in response to a clip I'd posted about how decimals and commas elongate a number.

For example:

50,000.00

50,000

50000

50k

In the clip I show an ad promoting a $50k cash giveaway and make the point that it would have been more impressive (though less poetic) had they used $50,000.00.

It's known as Magnitude Representation (Coulter, Choi and Munroe, 2011).

So why do I love co...

Change management isn’t really about behaviour.

Back when I worked in corporate, we'd have rounds of Change Management.

Yes, that's Change Management with a capital C and M.

Because Change Management was a program of work. A process to shepherd the workforce from one system to another. This could be new software, new policies or a new management methodology.

That means it's about changing behaviour, right?

We participated in hours of briefings and brain storms to ensure we were engaged, rea...

Five emerging issues that small business owners are struggling with right now?

That’s what I asked ChatGPT.

The unsurprising result?

It came back with issues that are NOT in fact emerging. They’re not new. They are not of this time, specifically.

And that’s because not as much changes as we think. 

The fundamentals of running a business stay the same.

So, what were the five issues ChatGPT listed?

1. Financial management - being able to manage cash flow and budget
2. Future planning - being a...