Author Archives: StevenY

Practice, we are told, makes perfect. Regardless of the discipline, the rule pretty much applies across the board. The writer Malcolm Gladwell goes a step further in his book Outliers and states that to become truly successful in any field that practice should amount to around 10,000 hours. In some instances, physical practice isn’t always [...]

Each February the Edelman Trust Barometer comes out and it really should be read by all involved in employee communications. The Trust Barometer studies the concept of trust as it relates to business, corporate reputation and corporate communications among a very specific audience: college-educated, top quartile of income by age group, and follows business/news media and policy [...]

We’ve all experienced brainstorming sessions: a group of people, often chosen largely for political reasons, begin by listening passively as a moderator (often an outsider who knows little about the business) urges you to “Get creative!” and “Think outside the box!” and cheerfully reminds you that “There are no bad ideas!” The result? Some attendees [...]

Senior management often assume that staff trust them simply because they are a manager. In their position of authority, trust from employees is a given. Isn’t it? Well, not according to research – studies since the global financial crisis in particular, have shown that almost a third of UK employees have little or no trust [...]

Science has shown that humans remember information better when their emotions are involved. As early as 1890, psychologist William James observed that emotions “leave a scar upon the cerebral tissue.”  Since then, the number of studies on the connection between emotion and memory has skyrocketed. Only a small fraction of the business world, however, applies [...]

The Government keeps telling us that being happy is more important than being rich, and will be supplementing GDP with a measure of GWB (General Well-being) to measure the nation’s happiness. In his recent address, the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests that we seek real happiness, above and beyond economic and material wealth. And most organisations [...]

Henry Erskine Crum and Alexander Will – Spoonfed Media We met at the LSE where we were studying economics and we spent a lot of time talking about what we wanted to do when we graduated. We decided there was a market opportunity in the ‘what’s on’ and listings domain. The biggest player was Time [...]

Last week, a Goldman Sachs banker made a very public resignation with his letter to his employers, detailing his criticism of their leadership and his view on the state of their company, being published in the New York Times. Whether he was right or wrong in the facts about Goldman Sachs and the senior staff [...]