A Better Course

• Compare the Meerkat
  "This meerkat goes to Weston Super Mare to play slot machine and snog stranger outside closed beach bar or stand in middle of gigantic empty car park when feeling sickness of home in Kalahari." — I think this is quite lovely.
  (tags: marketing advertising comparethemarket comparethemeerkat meerkat )

• Bob Sutton: In Praise of Simple Competence
  "The importance of simple competence in the routines of organizational life is often overlooked when we sing the grand arias of management, but effective bureaucracies are rarely dramatic…. Much of what distinguishes a good bureaucracy from a bad one is how it accomplishes the the trivia of day to day relations with clients and day-to-day problems in maintaining and operating its technology."
  (tags: management leadership bobsutton bureaucracy jamesmarch operations )
• Critic’s Notebook – What’s Wrong With Vogue? – NYTimes.com
  Condé Nast, having monopolized high-end magazines, has a rather odd relationship with luxury advertisers — which is that these advertisers cannot afford to go somewhere else, bad economy or not. Luxury brands haven’t yet found a formula for success in digital media.
  (tags: advertising nytimes media luxury article fashion magazine vogue annawintour )

• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community | Only selected advertising » UHU Glue: Best Use
  "You are part of a plan greater than you can possibly imagine"
  (tags: advertising ibelieveinadvertising glue uhu )

• Bob Sutton: Good to Great: More Evidence That "Most Claims of Magic are Testimony to Hubris"
  as I struggle to identify evidence-based practices –and practices that seem promising, cool, or have been used to good effect in a few places — that help managers and others do their work more effectively, to achieve what might be called "ordinary greatness," I think that perhaps all of us who are paid to give advice to managers and leaders owe to them, and to all the employees whose jobs depend on their actions, to come clean about the limits of our claims and our knowledge.
  (tags: business management leadership bobsutton greatness )

• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community | Goldstar Beer: Flow chart
  It is so rare that I am offended by adverts – even Yorkie's "Not For Girls" didn't pull my chain as much as maybe it should have done – but this is genuinely repellent.
  (tags: advertising ibelieveinadvertising flowchart offensive sexist goldstarbeer )
• RANDOM RANTINGS | Mental models – let's all think within the same box
  Thus, forming mental models is how we learn; they enable us to make quick decisions without the need for complete information. This is a powerful thing to have for every organisation. You don’t want all people thinking out of the box all the time; a coherent group of like-minded people with lots of common experience can be a very useful asset indeed. Hence, groupthink can be a good thing, as long as you make sure to have multiple groups…
  (tags: strategy freekvermeulen groupdynamics groupthink )
• FT.com / Business education – Out of the shadows into a brighter future
  Gallina, who is Ukrainian, is one of 18 formerly trafficked women who attended a programme at Imperial College Business School in London earlier this year developed specifically to address their needs – to build their personal and entrepreneurial skills.
  (tags: ft businesseducation women entrepreneurship work )
• FT.com / Features of the week – Soapbox: On dangerous ground
  According to research by McKinsey*, the flight to either end of the market is universal; the difference is in the speed, degree and direction. They conclude the middle ground is the most dangerous place to be. “The car market seems to be bifurcating . . . the middle ground is the killing fields, the worst business to be in.”
  (tags: ft brand branding businesseducation luxury )

• GameSetWatch – COLUMN: Bell, Game, and Candle – 'The Top Fifty Press Release Quotes Of 2008'
  “This is the first time Pitchfork Media has partnered with a videogame publisher, which is exciting since we share the same dedicated passion for highlighting new artists and being involved in independent music.” — There is more where this came from
  (tags: brand branding pitchfork gamesetwatch pressreleases )

• How Bernard Madoff did it | Con of the century | The Economist
  "Some clients reportedly suspected that Mr Madoff was engaged in wrongdoing, but not the sort that would endanger their money. They thought he might be trading illegally for their benefit on information gleaned by his marketmaking arm."
  (tags: bernardmadoff theeconomist finance scam greed )

Julia Roberts

Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

Of all the adverts I’ve seen this year, I think this (late entry) surprised me the most. Not because of the concept – the hilarious coincidence that sometimes people who are not famous share names with people who are famous has been used before – or the clumsy copy. It surprised me because I actually know the person in the photograph. And she really is called Julia Roberts.

If I didn’t know Julia, I would have assumed that the person in the photograph was a model, and the strapline a complete fabrication, intended just to get a bit of attention using a famous name.

Ten years ago, that would probably have been the case. Finding a model, in London, of the right age, with the right name, is likely to be more trouble than it’s worth, and also low-impact – if you know someone is a model, you won’t be surprised to see them on a poster. A Facebook search, however, for someone of the right location, age, and name, is incredibly simple – and if one search fails, another one is equally easy.

I’m not sure how much more high impact it is – for the vast majority of people, it will just be the attention grabbing famous name on an otherwise nondescript advert, like they might have seen at any point in the last ten years. But something under that has shifted, and I’d like to see where an agency with more interesting ideas could take that.

• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community | Only selected advertising » Pedigree: Beware of the dog
  "He's about to explode"
  (tags: dog pedigree ibelieveinadvertising advertising funny )
• swissmiss: love-growth-cash triangle
  There’s a certain joy that comes from doing what you love, getting compensated for it and constantly learning new things in the process. Your goal should be to maximize each experience and try to cover as many new areas of the bigger triangle as possible.
  (tags: swissmiss career visualization )
• Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis | FlowingData
  Mint (the financial management app) and Wallstats (the guy who does the Death and Taxes poster) put together a "visual guide to the financial crisis" – or a flow chart, rather – to clear up some of those cloudy details. It goes back to 2003 after the dot-com crash up to the recent government bailout.
  (tags: flowingdata visualization recession america economy finance data )
• Bob Sutton: More on the Broken Culture in the Auto Industry: How Dysfunctional Power Dynamics Cause Bad Decisions
  I played a dirty trick: I gave the lowest ranking person at each table the answers ahead of time, saying that when it came time for the group ranking, their job was to everything in their power to convince the table they had the right ranking, short of revealing that I had given them the answer. Not a single table (about 15 tables of 10) got the right answer.
  (tags: management bobsutton corporateculture ford )

• Green Guru Gone Wrong: William McDonough
  Nike told McDonough the time had come to share the details with its thousands of vendors. To the company's shock, McDonough responded that he owned the list — it was proprietary. "He wanted to charge us for every supplier we rolled it out to. We didn't own it after we paid all this money, which made no sense," says the person from the Nike team. "You can develop lists until you're blue in the face, but if you don't have effective ways to roll that out to the supply chain, it's not going to change it." — Yes
  (tags: fastcompany williammcdonough cradletocradle sustainability design nike )