By Bob Bailly
My recent posts have looked at how our evolutionary past has shaped our modern business behaviour. Recently I looked at the desire to live and work in a tribal setting – a feeling so powerful that many of our business practices are based upon a tribe’s primitive functioning. I also looked at the notion that tribes demand strong leaders, and these leaders must inspire their followers (through fear, heredity or action). Followers must also understand and accept their roles for the tribe to be successful.
I pointed out that there were other conditions necessary for us to want to belong. Here are three I noted, with some comments about implications for modern business.
- Tribes have a strong culture and are prone to develop and use cultural symbols.
- Tribes develop stories, sometimes magical and sometimes mythical, that define their values.
- Tribes have enemies, and the stronger the enemy the stronger the loyalty to the tribe.
Read More
We kicked off the second year of our new blog with a strong month of posts that covered a wide range of topics including leadership, content marketing, SEO, Pinterest for B2B businesses, trademarks, free tools for social media and PR, and succession planning.
On that final point, we said a sad farewell to a valued colleague last month. For our Linda Forrest, it was time for a new challenge in a new city. After a successful seven years with us, Linda has taken on the role of Digital Media Communities Manager at the Canadian Digital Media Network based in Kitchener/Waterloo. We welcome you to reach out to her on LinkedIn or Twitter to stay in touch.
Without further ado, here are our posts, in case you missed them, from February.
February 8: Giving your team ownership by Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
February 15: Burning the candle at both ends as the clock ticks down by Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette
February 21: What an IP Coordinator should know: Something about trademarks by David French
And on a related note…
In addition to our series, our associates and guest bloggers were also busy writing on a great range of topics. Here are our other posts from February, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
Read More
This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from September 2007. We welcome your feedback.
By Linda Forrest
Working in the technology realm as we do, it is inevitable that we encounter many, many acronyms in our daily work. A quick scan of the blogosphere reveals that it’s a hot topic amongst technology marketers like Chris Hoskin and analysts alike.
There are so many acronyms in play and unfortunately a lot of them overlap. When you see CMS, do you think it means content management system, or contact management system, or code management system, or client music synthesis, or…
What about BPM? Coming from a musical background, I had always associated this particular acronym with beats per minute. How wrong I was. It can also mean business performance management, business process management, or business process modeling. POS could mean point of sale, point of service, or piece of… you get the idea.
Read More
By Francis Moran
Everywhere I turn these days, it seems that content marketing is being touted as the latest must-do for business-to-business technology marketers. And there seems to be considerable angst over how to do it properly.
“Content marketing is a fairly new concept that many marketers are struggling to figure out,” said a post yesterday on business2community.com. In the post, author Rachel Foster reported on a recent survey of LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketer’s Group that asked, “Can you use one word to describe the biggest challenge facing B2B marketing today?” A word cloud of the more than 1,000 comments so far clearly shows ROI to be the dominant concern, followed very closely by content.
In a similar vein, in a round-up earlier this month of the biggest B2B marketing disruptions of 2011, Michael Brenner of B2B Marketing Insider said, “People have been talking about content marketing for at least a couple of years. But in 2011, it really seemed to hit its stride.”
I could cite several additional examples, but I think you get my point. According to a large swath of the B2B braintrust out there, content marketing is the greatest new thing, and we’d better all get aboard.
Read More
By Bob Bailly
Has evolution prepared humans to live in the world we have created? Was Desmond Morris correct when he pointed out that, “Man’s biological equipment is not strong enough to cope with the unbiological environment it has created?” Has our transition from hunter/gatherer living in a cave to cosmopolitan businessperson living in a luxury condo been as smooth as we’d like to think?
In my last post, I postulated that humans prefer to live and work in a tribal setting and promised to explore the nuance of this from a modern business perspective. Today’s focus will be on the role of leadership.
Read More
By Bob Bailly
