David Olney 28 April, 2023Now that I spend a lot of my working hours assisting small businesses to succeed, I am always looking for clear ways to explain important points and new ways to improve situations. When I wrote my recent blog post on The Founder’s Dilemma, I started thinking about what makes a business […]
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The Founder’s Dilemma: Building your business without blunting your people
David Olney 27 March, 2023 During my years of working as a consultant, I have regularly discerned a gap between leaders’ vision of what their teams should be doing and their teams’ understanding of and ability to do what they do. In larger organisations, leaders regularly have a particular take on how to translate top […]
Leadership Lessons from The Long War
David Olney 23 February, 2023 After listening to a novel, I often come away with a new appreciation of a particular aspect of the human condition, and am reminded that stories are the best way to learn complex things. Sometimes, I listen to a novel and it both teaches me something new, as well as […]
Why do we need to belong to a community?
David Olney 1 February, 2023 While a group has common interests, a community shares the common value of wanting to improve the well-being of its members. The above sentence is a summary of the results of three weeks of reading and thinking. I started off by reading Mark Schaefer’s new book, Belonging to the Brand, […]
Why should life not be spent building a fortress?
David Olney 3 January, 2023 In my recent blog post, “Why should life be like a terraced hillside?”, I argued that people should create, plant, and build on several terraces as they explore the hillside of life. If people create terraces as they go, then the worst thing that can happen is that they will […]
Why should life be like a terraced hillside?
David Olney 26 December, 2022 Now that I have completed my Master of Media in Strategic Communication, I have a bit more time to think about things that capture my attention. For most of the month (December 2022), I have consistently returned to thinking about why some people keep on moving forward, and only fall […]
Answering People’s Questions: Making Inbound Marketing Useful and Practical
David Olney 7 December, 2022 Join Steve Davis and me as we discuss the practical steps you can take to apply Inbound Marketing techniques, based on my recently completed Master’s Thesis. Either 13:00 or 19:00 on Monday, 12 December. Click one of the below links to reserve your spot. I’m looking forward to sharing what […]
How to change minds, one at a time
David Olney 6 December, 2022 When I was teaching Strategic Culture, International Security, and Complex Problem Solving at University, a couple of things remained constant: when you present people with an endless parade of abstract theories and facts without engaging context, they learn almost nothing. In contrast, when you tell people stories about characters with […]
I just received a High Distinction for my thesis on Inbound Marketing!
David Olney 22 November, 2022 As the title suggests, I just received a High Distinction for my thesis on Inbound Marketing, completing my Master of Media in Strategic Communication in the nicest way possible. The last two years have been a roller-coaster, and I couldn’t be happier with what I have learned and where it […]
Why should we treat people how they would like to be treated?
David Olney 21 November, 2022 As children, almost all of us learn a version of the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It makes sense as a heuristic for decent behaviour, and it pops up in conversation every few months. When I listened to Joe Polish’s new book, […]