The second Tuesday of every second month the Strathmore Unicorns Junior Basketball Club’s committee meets. I’m the club Secretary and last Tuesday we were discussing the perennial topic of how to encourage our players (and their parents) to pay their registration fees on time. Each year the Treasurer send a letter to laggards warning them […]

Congratulations on doing TheStoryTest—and if you haven’t done it, reading this blog post now is tantamount to cheating—shame on you 🙂 Here are the quick answers. Below we will explain why each example is or is not a story. Pizza innovation – no Basement flood at Tree Hill – yes Hewlett Packard’s European operations – […]

Daniel Kahneman, the founder of behavioural economics and winner of the Nobel prize in Economics, tell this story in a recent TED talk. A friend was recently listening to a recording of a beautiful symphony and then at the end of the recording there was a terrible screeching noise. “It ruined the whole experience for […]

Since we started Anecdote in 2004 our local Kwik Kopy in Coburg has printed most of our posters and workshop materials. Kelvin does a great job. Always high quality, delivered when we need it despite the outrageous time frames we sometimes impose. That was the case up until this Wednesday. We’d created a high quality […]

In late May 2009 I was invited to advise on change management on a big project in Sydney. The client was a medium size logistics organisation with a history of poor performance, low staff engagement and sub-standard customer service. They were in the midst of something of a crisis. They had been directed to substantially […]

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–73) was a Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist who taught at Harvard. Imagine that you went to Louis Agassiz’s laboratory at Harvard as a student. Agassiz would place a small tin pan in front of you with a small fish and utter the stern requirement that you “should study it, but […]

Seth Godin has a new ebook out called What Matters Now. It consists of 80 or so thought leaders each with a page to talk about an idea that matters to them. Each idea is summed up in a single word such as Dignity, Autonomy, Attention, Difference. You can download the ebook here. Dan and […]

In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy […]

Registered Post is reliable system for getting important items from one place to another, right? Well read on – you might re-think your answer. Last night Con and Faye, old friends from Queensland, came over for dinner. As is usual in these circumstances, the beer and wine flowed and the conversation was non-stop as we […]

This morning, Shawn and I compared recent airline lounge experiences. Mine went a like this On Monday morning I took my Mum to the airport for her flight back to Melbourne. We arrived at about 9.15 am – the airport was as quiet as I have seen it. We had 30 minutes before the flight […]