Recently, a hiring Manager contacted me about a job she said I was perfect for. However, the office was far from me. I live in Central London. This job, as head of Demand Generation, was in Manchester, which is a 4-5 hour drive, and over 200 miles from my house. I had read the job description earlier, when this manager first contacted me on LinkedIn. It said that the role was 'hybrid.' But given the distance, I had assumed this meant, at most, being in the office once a week, at least, perhaps once a month, or couple of months. Funnily enough, I had worked in a similar role in Cambridge, abou ..read more

There are successful companies with good cultures and successful companies with terrible cultures. I've read the excellent Elon Musk and Steve Jobs biographies written by Walter Isaacson.  Some of it is genuinely eye-watering. If you look at Apple under Steve Jobs, many today will argue that the company had a terrible culture.  When he fired people at Pixar, he made their notice period 'retroactive.'  In interviews, he'd ask incredibly inappropriate questions like 'How old were you when you lost your virginity?' or 'How many times have you taken LSD?' Steve Jobs fired the emp ..read more

The Marketing learning curve  I have many professional friends: Doctors, lawyers, accountants, Psychologists, psychiatrists, Investment bankers & University Professors (many of them!). They don't experience this same phenomenon regularly that I, and anecdotally, almost all of my marketing colleagues do. Granted, my brother-in-law, who runs a garage door business, does fancy himself as a bit of a lawyer and will weigh in on this topic occasionally (I studied law, and my father is a retired high court judge). His opinions do make for some colourful family discussions. And we are all to ..read more

'All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players', This week, my father surprised me by suggesting we go to the LSE, where I was a student, to see Professor Richard Sennett of Columbia University's talk on his latest book 'The Great Fear: The Politics of Performing.'  I didn't take notes, and my insights here are more my impression of the topic and then some of my further discussions with other friends, particularly Damien Seaman, whom I've worked closely with over the last seven years, on content strategy. Why is it that demagogues like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson ..read more

In my fifteen years working for tech startups, one area that I've seen some founders do exceptionally well and others do abysmally badly, is marketing. I worked for one CEO who called marketing 'the colouring in department' - not great for my self-esteem!  And several CEOs considered Marketing a drain on money and obviously didn't like or trust their marketing leadership. But here are five founders I know understand the value of marketing.  Jay Chaudhry, founder of Zscaler Jay had already founded and sold three companies before he set up Zscale, a leader in cloud-based cyber securi ..read more

60% of employees are actively looking for work right now. That number is even higher for smaller companies, more like 75%. How about in your company? Frank, your best salesperson, who ‘loves your company’. Is he interviewing at three other companies right this minute? How about Sally, who ‘couldn’t work anywhere else’ and is your 'client onboarding ninja'? Is she really with you? Or is she ‘Open for work’ to recruiters on LinkedIn? Times are tough – interest rates are rising, making those once easy-to-pay mortgage payments almost unbearable—everything has gone up in price, except for salarie ..read more

In my career, 'marketing strategy' has come up from time to time. However, often it has been confused with operational effectiveness.  Operational effectiveness Is Not Strategy. The root of the problem in answering the question of 'what is marketing strategy?'; is the need for more clarity to distinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy. Of course, companies must be flexible to respond rapidly to competitive and market changes. They must benchmark continuously to achieve best practices. Marketing has more platforms, ways to measure and analytics benchmarks than ever. Althou ..read more

A doctor is one of my closest friends and someone I often visit for advice. He also has a PhD in medicine (funnily enough, four of my close friends have PhDs, one in economics, one in philosophy, and the other in English literature, and Psychology). I always respected medical professionals, but I had never known that much about them until I became friends with 'Bob' (Let's call him 'Bob'). I've learned much from Bob about being ethical, patient, rational, objective, and compassionate. He's helped me with many aspects of my life, from my marriage, kids, career, and general life problems. I'm a ..read more

  Why your company must implement fertility and menopause policies now. There’s plenty of research to show that happy employees are more productive and that objectively ranked happy companies (via Glassdoor and other review sites) outperform other publicly listed companies on the stock exchange. Listening to your employees and responding to their needs is crucial. Only more so today than ever, where employees are in short supply generally and where there’s an even greater scarcity of top talent in areas as diverse as Sales, engineering, software programming, data science and more. What s ..read more

I'm not an expert at being happy. But I have thought about it a lot. I was fortunate to grow up around many wealthy and successful people. However, like many, members of my extended family, and friends, have suffered from a range of mental illnesses, ranging from addiction, alcoholism, and eating disorders to bipolar, anxiety, depression and OCD.  One of my uncles, a Managing director of a cosmetics company, suffered from depression and committed suicide in his mid-forties, leaving a wife and two twin children, aged three. One of my closest and oldest friends, an award-winning journalis ..read more