Michel Hogan

These four simple things can increase the value of your brand

The best time to start was a year ago. The second-best time is now. Of course, I’m paraphrasing the famous Chinese proverb about planting trees. But the sentiment is true whether you’re talking trees, reading more, drinking less or adding value to…

Patagonia’s next act: Make Earth its only shareholder

Yvon Chouinard, the influential, irascible founder of outdoor apparel company Patagonia, last week announced the next bold act in a long line of moves that have challenged the status quo of how a company can succeed and hold to what it believes. Not…

What we owe each other

When a brand’s store of value overflows, there’s usually an undercurrent of I care about what you care about going on between me and you. It shows up in both the promises made and agreed upon. Within those same promises is a contract called ‘what we…

Genuine engagement is found in activity

Forbes Magazine describes the idea of staff engagement as “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals”. And organisations’ desire for that commitment often kicks off a slew of things designed to motivate people and…

How Qantas traded its reputation for a bump to its bottom line

A night spent on a cold, hard terminal floor in Dallas wasn’t a part of the trip to Sydney that 300 Qantas passengers expected. Frustrated, they tweeted: “There was a mechanical fault with the plane which of course needs to be addressed (!!) but…

A secret weapon for managing your values

The continuing effort to keep values in balance tempts many organisations to measure and manage them in people’s performance and behaviours. Judging whether they’re holding the value or not. But there is a different way to keep values on track, so…

Every choice is an opportunity to show your purpose

Turn in any direction these days, and you’ll trip over people talking about their purpose. This is not a bad thing; it’s essential to individual and group endeavours. Yet, when I look past the virtue signals of purpose-led this and purposeful that, I…

How good intentions become bad communications

It’s 1990, and a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton is using a game to test how people communicate. She’s assigned students roles of ‘tappers’ and ‘listeners’ and asked the tappers to pick a well-known song and…

Planning an April Fools’ Day prank? You probably shouldn’t

The start of April might feel like an opportunity too good to pass up. When better to roll out some levity than with permission from the calendar and marketing gods. Please, don’t. I get it. Geopolitical aggression is on the march. We’re still making…

Stop ‘mis-placing’ your brand and put its value to work.

“And then we started the brand work“, said the CEO while I listened to her talk about the behind-the-scenes effort to reimagine their product. Then, later the same week, I received another company’s business plan. A comment hidden in the notes for…

Your values will benefit from some (productive) tension

Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle’s golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension. Look under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this…

How Aristotle and Buddhism can help define your core values.

Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more worthy and useful question. I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about…

A new tool for making promises you can keep

On the bottom shelf of my bookcase, I’ve got a small library of books and a stack of papers that explore promises and commitments. The authors ramble at length about the moral foundations and legal consequences of making, keeping and breaking…

Put play to work

When an organisation puts a ‘fun place to work’ in their values, they often mean a games room, funky furniture and kombucha on tap. Not how they carry out the unheroic work living beneath the trappings. The Play Ethic author Pat Kane says play “Helps…

Powershop’s acquisition by Shell shows the risk of making promises that aren’t yours to keep

News last week that Meridian Energy has inked a deal to sell green energy company Powershop sent people heading for the exits. It seems the acquisition by global energy behemoth Shell and its investment partner Infrastructure Capital Group struck…

Set your upper bounds and march to success

Taking measured action over and over is decidedly unsexy. Especially given it runs counter to the more common ‘splashy launch’ mindset. Yet, when I encountered the idea laid out a decade apart by two authors, it seemed like both an antidote and a…

Changing its name won’t solve Facebook’s image problems

Analogies to Google Inc becoming Alphabet abound amid recent speculation that Facebook Inc. is planning to change its name — not the ubiquitous ‘app’, but the corporate wrapper it shares with Instagram, Snapchat, Oculus and others. A better choice…

In a game of experience happenstance, you lose.

Experience without expectations is unthinkable — literally. What I believe will happen plays a prominent part in how I feel about what does happen. Even when it’s part of a subconscious story I didn’t know I was telling myself. So, why should…

Gone in a puff: Lessons of Theranos and its lying promises

The trial of Elizabeth Holmes, founder and CEO of disgraced blood-testing startup Theranos, has begun in a San Francisco courtroom. Holmes sits accused of defrauding patients, doctors, and investors of more than $700 million — charges which she…

The lost valley of unheroic work

Organisations are made of unheroic work — those thousands of everyday actions and decisions that keep your particular engine turning. Hidden and often unexamined, it is the lion-share of what people do in their jobs. I call the gap between what you…