Interbrand’s Chairman Rita Clifton believes that good branding is the only way of generating sustainable value.

I heard Clifton speak at my livery last night about the winners and losers of the international brand world. 

US brands account for 51 of the world’s leading top 100 brands, Germany for 11, France for eight and the UK for only four.

The most dramatic entry into this league has been Google. Clifton attributes its success to the consistency between external messages and internal culture. “It’s no longer possible to look nice on the outside and have an axe-murdering culture on the inside.”

Apple is another winner. Its design has brought humanity to technology. “You just want to lick their products!”
If you are a brand owner, you have to remember three key points: clarity (as to what you stand for), consistency and leadership (to rally people around brand values).

Yang-May and I believe that the interactive web has made it possible for the man/woman in the street to promote their personal brand online the same way celebrities and products do. Web 2.0 has levelled the playing ground. This is one of the main points we will be making this evening as part of our guest lecture at London Metropolitan University.

How do you structure silence…?

I came across a quote by Daniel Barenboim, the renowned pianist: “…it is so disruptive when an enthusiastic audience applauds before the final sound has died away, because there is one last moment of expressivity, which is precisely the relationship between the end of the sound and the beginning of the silence that follows. In this respect music is a mirror of life, because both start and end in nothing”.

As a communicator, you feel under constant pressure to fill silence with words and messages.

Silence often terrifies us….We dread silence during presentations because we think it can only mean two things: either we have forgotten what to say or that the audience is not interested and is therefore not asking questions.

We all live under the tyranny of words until something happens…

It was my coaching  training that made me realise the power of silence.

Silence is an essential component of any successful coaching session… Only by building in silence can issues be explored in depth…. Real break-throughs only happen after powerful moments of silence…

So how do we apply this to communications?

The answer might be that we just need to be brave and resist the urge to structure every minute of our presentations, sessions, pitches, etc.

Another quote by Barenboim got me thinking: “I will … attempt the impossible and try to draw some connections between the inexpressible content of music and the inexpressible content of life”.

Communicators do the same. We are brokers of passions. We help people express ideas and we get audiences excited about them.

Is silence the secret ingredient we need to use to turn ideas into reality?

The ability to write is such a mixed blessing.

It is an integral part of who you are and you can’t do without it. A friend of mine who edits a magazine in the US told me once that only when she writes she feels that she is doing real work.

I have this nagging feeling sometimes when I am in meetings that I should not be there… I should be at my computer instead….writing. As if I had to report everything I experience… every day… ever minute.

To complicate the matter, the business communication profession is often misunderstood. Why do companies need professional writers and story tellers, given that everybody can more or less knock a couple of sentences together?

Next time you are asked this question, you can quote Colonel David Scott.

Scott was the commander of the Apollo 15 mission to the moon. Ever since his lunar landing in 1971, Scott  spent much of his time talking to people who wanted to know how it was like to walk on the moon. He slipped into an unexpected role and became the mission’s story teller.

Scott realised that flying to the moon had been such a pivotal experience in the history of humanity that it wasn’t enough for people to see a couple of minutes of filming on TV. They needed to hear the story from somebody who was there. They needed another human being to tell them how it felt. It was important for them in order to be able to integrate this event into their consciousness.

This is why Scott is calling for the crew of future missions to the moon or Mars to include non-scientists, people able to describe the splendour of the cosmos. “It could be an artist or a poet or a writer - or even a songwriter”.

What a great endorsement for our profession!!!

Don’t get me wrong. I am not writing this because I think I am special.

It is just an obsession of mine. I want to find out what living abroad for the past 26 years has done to my brain.

Apparently, I am more likely than other people to be able to use a box of tacks as a candle holder.

According to studies conducted by William Maddux, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour at INSEAD and Adam Galinsky, Professor of Ethics and Management at the Kellogg School, living abroad and creativity are tightly connected.

MBA students at the Kellogg School were asked to solve the famous Duncker candle problem. Results showed that the longer students had spent living abroad the more likely they were to find a creative solution.

The university also ran a second test on them involving the mock sale of a gas station. Again, those students who had lived abroad were more likely to reach a deal that demanded a creative approach.

Vacations don’t count. Only living abroad leads to creativity.

Maddux and Galinsky found out that the more students had adapted to foreign cultures when they lived abroad, the more creative they turned out to be.

So, you see, it is worth enduring being called a foreigner a million times or having to eat the worst food ever (this was in Eastern Europe a long time ago).

Pay-back time eventually comes.

Tacks and candles are high on my shopping list for the weekend.