What's going on here, with this human? - Graham Duncan Blog
The philosopher Kwame Appiah writes that “in life, the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.” When I try to figure out what game I’m playing, I see that for the last 25 years I have been playing […]
"Marketing (2021 and beyond) will have to take the form of a structured plan, based on the assumption that, in a new and different world, equally new and different strategies are needed."
How to Become a Top Global Employer with Empowered Brand Ambassadors
Create a culture that attracts and retains exemplary employees by developing a brand ambassador strategy to make your organization an employer of choice for the people essential to your future.
How to create a sense of belonging for hybrid workers - All Things IC
A sense of belonging is something we all crave, whether in our personal lives or at work. Connecting with people that share our values and passions makes us feel part of something bigger than ourselves. And for so long, that sense of belonging has come from physical interactions as well as, in recent decades, digital ones. But then the unthinkable happened, and the world shut down.
Solving Brand Crisis By Breaking Patterns | Branding Strategy Insider
When the workers of the Norsk Hydro PVC plant in Stenungsund on the west coast of Sweden came to work in the early morning one day in 1996, a young man in In a brand crisis, break the pattern of perception in people's minds.
13 Brand And Business Book Recommendations | Branding Strategy Insider
Working with brand, we are always looking for informed and intelligent thinking on the key topics surrounding it. Only by constantly learning can we bring
What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter? — MatthewBall.vc
Why is every media company now an “every media” company? What is it that audiences truly want? And what’s the most important goal for a franchise or IP?
3 Recruitment Marketing Content Ideas That Attract Diverse Candidates
Recruitment Marketing is a critical component of diversity recruiting. Discover the 3 recruitment marketing content ideas that attract diverse candidates here.
A Tale of Two ‘Scandals’ and What They Can Teach Us about Employer Branding - Brandwagon
In the last few months, as we’ve been trying to crawl our way out from under COVID’s thumb, two very different but very telling stories have been brought to light that clearly demonstrate what an employer brand is and what it isn’t. But before we get to these stories, we should first dispel a […]
Patagonia shows corporate activism is simpler than it looks
From climate change to voting rights, Patagonia has been willing to risk backlash by taking positions on contentious social issues. It's a risk that has paid off.
With the expectation of a hiring surge on the horizon, these metrics matter now to guide decision-making and improve recruiting strategies from end to end.
Why your best employees are leaving and how to stop it | Culture Amp
Turnover: it’s an important metric for any organization’s health and one that executives across the business often scrutinize. At Culture Amp, we undertook our largest study on employee turnover to date, aiming to provide some much-needed context.
"Quit the tactical tricks and concentrate on building a brand that talks to people in a more attitudinal, interesting, and genuine way without the comforting paraphernalia of data."
Employer Branding Isn’t about You – It’s about Your Audience - Brandwagon
Individuals and organisations can get lost in branding. It’s a personal thing. Naturally you’ll want your brand to reflect your organisation, and do so in a consistent, accurate, and ideally positive way. But the truth about branding is that it doesn’t really matter what you want your brand to be about – all that […]
Learn how to optimize your remote video production setup for employee interviews.
To learn even more about filmmaking and video production in a digital world, connect with me on LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/elenavaletine1/)
How to Transform Your Internal Recruiting Strategy | SmartRecruiters
Our concise guide on why and how your talent acquisition team can transform its internal recruiting strategy in 2021. Sign up for our webinar on May 4 to learn more!
CEOs are hugely expensive – why not automate them?
Over the next two weeks, the boards of BAE Systems, AstraZeneca, Glencore, Flutter Entertainment and the London Stock Exchange all face the possibility of shareholder revolts over executive pay at their forthcoming annual general meetings (AGMs). As the AGM season begins, there is a particular focus on pay. Executive pay is often the most contentious item at an AGM, but this year is clearly exceptional. The people running companies that have been severely impacted by Covid-19 can’t be blamed for the devastation of their revenues by the pandemic, but they also can’t take credit for the government stimulus that has kept them afloat. Last week, for example, nearly 40 per cent of shareholders in the estate agents Foxtons voted against its chief executive officer, Nicholas Budden, receiving a bonus of just under £1m; Foxtons has received about £7m in direct government assistance and is benefiting from the government’s continued inflation of the housing market. The person who has done most to ensure Foxtons’ ongoing good fortune is not Nicholas Budden but Rishi Sunak. [Sign up here to get the New Statesman's business column every Monday] Under the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act, executive pay is voted on at least every three years, and this process forces shareholders and the public to confront how much the people at the top take home. Tim Steiner, the highest-paid CEO in the FTSE 100, was paid £58.7m in 2019 for running Ocado, which is 2,605 times the median income of his employees for that year, while the average FTSE100 CEO makes more than £15,000 a day. As the High Pay Centre’s annual assessment of CEO pay points out, a top-heavy wage bill extends beyond the CEO, and could be unsustainable for any company this year. “When one considers high earners beyond the CEO”, says the report, ”there is actually quite significant potential for companies to safeguard jobs and incomes by asking higher-paid staff to make sacrifices”. In the longer term, as companies commit to greater automation of many roles, it's pertinent to ask whether a company needs a CEO at all. A few weeks ago Christine Carrillo, an American tech CEO, raised this question herself when she tweeted a spectacularly tone-deaf appreciation of her executive assistant, whose work allows Carrillo to “write [and] surf every day” as well as “cook dinner and read every night”. In Carrillo’s unusually frank description of the work her EA does – most of her emails, most of the work on fundraising, playbooks, operations, recruitment, research, updating investors, invoicing “and so much more” – she guessed that this unnamed worker “saves me 60% of time”. Predictably, a horde arrived to point out that if someone else is doing 60 per cent of Carrillo’s job, they should be paid 50 per cent more than her. But as Carrillo – with a frankly breathtaking lack of self-awareness – informed another commenter, her EA is based in the Philippines. The main (and often the only) reason to outsource a role is to pay less for it. If most of a CEO's job can be outsourced, this suggests it could also be automated. But while companies are racing to automate entry- and mid-level roles, senior executives and decision makers show much less interest in automating themselves. There's a good argument for automating from the top rather than from the bottom. As we know from the annotated copy of Thinking, Fast and Slow that sits (I assume) on every CEO’s Isamu Noguchi nightstand, human decision-making is the product of irrational biases and assumptions. This is one of the reasons strategy is so difficult, and roles that involve strategic decision-making are so well paid. But the difficulty of making genuinely rational strategic decisions, and the cost of the people who do so, are also good reasons to hand this work over to software. Automating jobs can be risky, especially in public-facing roles. After Microsoft sacked a large team of journalists last year in order to replace them with AI, it almost immediately had to contend with the PR disaster of the software’s failure to distinguish between two women of colour. Amazon had to abandon its AI recruitment tool after it learned to discriminate against women. And when GPT-3, one of the most advanced AI language models, was used as a medical chatbot last year, it responded to a (simulated) patient presenting with suicidal ideation by telling them to kill themselves. What links these examples is that they were all attempts to automate the kind of work that happens without being scrutinised by lots of other people in a company. Top-level strategic decisions are different. They are usually debated before they’re put into practice – unless, and this is just another reason to automate them, employees feel they can’t speak up for fear of incurring the CEO’s displeasure. Where automated management – or “decision intelligence”, as Google and IBM call it – has been deployed, it’s produced impressive results. Hong Kong’s mass transit system put software in charge of scheduling its maintenance in 2004, and enjoys a reputation as one of the world’s most punctual and best-run metros. Clearly, chief execs didn’t get where they are today by volunteering to clear out their corner offices and hand over their caviar spittoons to robots. But management is a very large variable cost that only seems to increase – Persimmon's bonus scheme paid out half a billion pounds to 150 execs in a single year – while technology moves in the other direction, becoming cheaper and more reliable over time. It is often asked whether CEO pay is fair or ethical. But company owners and investors should be asking if their top management could be done well by a machine – and if so, why is it so expensive? [Get This Week in Business in your inbox every Monday morning]