A new and improved company profile (we hope)

Posted by  Shawn Callahan —February 1, 2006
Filed in News

Like all new businesses we’ve been asking questions of ourselves about what our business is all about. We’ve also had clients and friends say to us, “guys, read your company profile but we still don’t know what you do.”  Hmmm, bit of a worry.

After many weeks of discussion we’ve come up with a new company profile and we were hoping you might let us know what impression it leaves on you. Your thoughts will be greatly appreciated.

About  Shawn Callahan

Shawn, author of Putting Stories to Work, is one of the world's leading business storytelling consultants. He helps executive teams find and tell the story of their strategy. When he is not working on strategy communication, Shawn is helping leaders find and tell business stories to engage, to influence and to inspire. Shawn works with Global 1000 companies including Shell, IBM, SAP, Bayer, Microsoft & Danone. Connect with Shawn on:

Comments

  1. James Farmer says:

    For what it’s worth (which probably isn’t very much 🙂
    “culture change, change management, knowledge sharing and learning, and project evaluation.” is a bit clunky – too many ands
    “Anecdote helps organisations when traditional methods have fail” – I’d start with you guys… avoide failing first!
    “We favour participative approaches, approaches that bring people back into the organisation. These approaches yield a suite of interventions (not simplistic solutions) which can be applied to make real progress.”
    Again, clunky in the same para…
    Otherwise great, although if I was presenting this I’d like to probably cut it 25% and highlight certain phrases / sentences to draw people in.

  2. Emlyn says:

    Hi Shawn,
    I like it, but also have a couple of comments.
    First – who is it aimed at? I can read it fairly easily, but would a potential client,who may not be familiar with complexity science, open-space, etc be thrown off by what might be seen as jargon? Perhaps you could hyperlink these to explanations? The categories menu on the left isn’t appropriate for this: I clicked on Open Space, and the first thing I saw was the picture of the contortionist, which might not be quite what people expect!
    Second – related to the first, since you say you offer training courses, perhaps there could be a clearly visible link to information about them.
    Third – typo: 6th paragraph, ‘specialist’ not ‘specialists’.
    Fourth – where are the associates: all in Australia, or spread around the region?
    All small points, but I hope that’s helpful.
    Cheers,
    Emlyn

  3. These are excellent observations Emlyn. The description is aimed at potential clients and anybody who would like to know what we do. I agree that they might be put off by the jargon and I think we should either remove it or explain it. The linking idea is a good one. Perhaps we should have a page somewhere that briefly explains the key concepts and techniques we mention.
    We run our narrative training courses each year but haven’t set dates for 2006 yet. Must get onto this. We will have an events page up soon.
    Our associates are mainly Australia and Asia. We would like to build relationships with other firms in the US becase the major proportion of our blog readership is US based.
    Once again, thanks heaps for the feedback.

  4. Thanks James. Yep, I had some hestitation about the clunky phrase you highlight. Perhaps make it “organisation change, learning and project evaluation.”
    I’ll have to don my de-clunkyfier 🙂
    Highlighting words and phrases is essential. Good one.

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