In 1994, Colm Marshall, then CEO of British Airways, appointed Paul Birch to be Corporate Jester in order to ‘stir things up’. By all accounts Mr Birch was asked to play a mercurial role: promote creativity, show managers that just because they were boss did not mean they were right…

Book summary In this heartfelt and absorbing book, Christie Watson reflects on her years of nursing, through a tapestry of stories about kindness and caring, and the costs of this daily compassion for strangers, who pass continually in and out of her life. The book’s central thesis is that nursing, as well…

Book summary

A guest blog by Stefan Ravalli I’m out for dinner with my wife at a really nice restaurant and everything is fine. The flavors of the food and drink are on point and so is the timing of their delivery and the knowledge and efficiency of the team. Everything is…

Serving is about helping another person progress from one state to a better state. In the past few weeks we’ve seen a remarkable resurgence of people doing just that — serving. The variety has been striking. The most visible are the health workers and carers — those providing care in…

Cognitive diversity has never been so important. If you can see patterns in complex information, use deep empathy to research and understand the needs of others, and coach agile innovation teams to be vulnerable, without burning out — then your skills have never been more valuable than they are now…

I hope we’ve left The Experience Economy behind. I’m tired of Customer and Employee Experience. It was good while it lasted, in that it renewed everyone’s focus on the importance of the customer and the employee in any service. But the outcome of a decade of experience programmes has been…

The economics of early intervention are obvious to everyone, with examples all around us. “A stitch in time saves nine” is a well-known trope because it speaks to a simple logic. If you don’t intervene early with a tear, that tear will increase in size, leading to more cost to…

It matters where you start from. The business world has been enamoured with warfare for so long. The first org chart was invented by a prussian general. Strategy is a military word. We talk about capturing customers and value. Only then do we talk about love — love for a…