The subject line of the very first edition of the New Thinking newsletter by Gerry McGovern was ‘Massively parallel societies’ and opened like this:
Language is the invention of a co-operative society, and we wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t co-operated.
This was on June 24, 1996 and Gerry wrote about how multimedia and the Internet would hopefully help us realize again that we are nothing without each other.
Since then his monthly newsletter has gained traction and readers around the world, including yours truly and he’s kept doing it now with a weekly dose of provocative and thoughtful insights.
Besides his newsletter, Gerry is perhaps even more known as the inventor of the Top Task framework, the author of several books and his relentless focus on helping organizations become more customer centric on the Web.
Recently his focus has shifted to sustainability with his most recent book titled World Wide Waste. Gerry is based in Ireland and also our expert of the month.
Read moreHow do you best provide organisations with a no nonsense way to gather and organise content?
This was the original problem that Alice Deer and her co-founder Angus Edwardson set out to solve some 10 years, when they founded a software firm called Gather. Quickly it became GatherContent and their initial approach was to provide an easy way to collect and structure client content. Painlessly was the keyword back then, where many customers were profoundly loud about how their disliked working with content in their CMS.
Fast forward to today, and Alice has been the CEO in a small business with 20 employees for 10 years. In this function, Alice has been going through all the typical entrepreneurial roles of hiring, dealing with finance, marketing and naturally also speaking with customers.
Earlier this month another big milestone was achieved as GatherContent was acquired by Bynder, so now her role is shifting once again. Now she is General Manager in the GatherContent part of the bigger business based out of her home in Brighton, UK. She is also our expert of the month.
Read moreHow do you make Google love your website? At a recent peer group meeting, Ture Alsvik gave his presentation a Valentine’s Day-theme and shared his insights on how you build a long term and good relationship between your website and the giant search engine.
Ture is SEO Manager at Lomax, a Danish business supplies and equipment firm with roots back to the 60’s, but today a modern e-commerce firm. As an SEO manager, his time is divided between the content, the technical dimension and naturally a fair bit of reporting. Previously he worked 12 years at travel firm Spies, where he also worked at the intersection of traffic, visibility and conversion.
He’s based north of wonderful Copenhagen and also our expert of the month.
Read moreHow do you make design accessible for everyone in your organisation? One option is to build an internal design community of practice, drip feed your colleagues with inspiration, cultivate a sharing culture and at some point let it go.
When I first spoke to Grace de Athayde, back in circa mid 2020, I was preparing our first European conference during the pandemic and Grace wanted tell her story about building a UX Community at Danfoss which went from zero to 200 members in less than a year.
In the process, she made it quite clear, including on her opening slides at that time, that she was not an expert, but I think everyone who has met Grace in the past years, would say that she’s very knowledgeable about user experience and design.
These days she is wrapping up at Danfoss and getting ready to start a new job at the LEGO Group as Sr. Manager Digital Product Design as of 1 February.
She’s also our first expert of the month for 2022.
Read more“Internal communication can build the bridge to the future of work”
Contributing towards making the world a better place to work is a big part of what Anke Maibach does. In her role as Head of Internal Communications and Employer Branding Europe at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), she is based in their Frankfurt office and focuses on filling her role in a very large, complex and global organisation. As of writing these lines, TCS has more than 530,000 employees.
In her own words, she sometimes sees herself as the black sheep at work. The one who comes with the unexpected point of view, or the one who looks beyond the traditional silo thinking. Interconnectivity between departments and finding the different pieces of the puzzle is important to Anke,
Anke is coming up with 14 years at TCS. Her past roles include being the Director of Communication for Central Europe and before that she was the Marketing Manager for Central Europe. Prior to joining TCS, she also worked in various marketing roles. She is our final expert of the month for 2021 and below you can learn more about her way of thinking and how she sees the big challenges towards 2022.
Read moreIt’s all about building bridges - in particular between different ways of thinking
Talking to Kristina Larsen who is a UX specialist at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, you might expect to hear about how her design leadership work bridges different departments, but as she shared her story, it became clear that her years studying at Aalborg University and Aarhus University, and now almost 14 years working in higher education, has taken her to the next level.
In her own words, she strives to make others feel welcome, heard, valued and supported, which applies whether you are a colleague, student, a customer at VIA or a close friend.
Kristina is also a leisure doodler, a freelance mini farmer living on a field in the middle of Jutland and dreaming about landing her first board position in the next couple of years. Earlier this month, she was a highly rated track leader at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference and she is our expert of the month.
Read more"If not you, who?" and “if not now, when?"
Ron Brumbarger set the stage for an inspirational conversation about leadership, mentoring and life-long learning with these two seemingly simple questions.
Ron enjoys mentoring and teaching and finds it fascinating to hear the different answers to these two questions, but clearly also challenges himself with the questions from time to time.
He is Founder and President of Apprentice University, based in Indiana in the US and also our expert of the month.
Read more“To build your innovation muscle you need motivation, practice and success”
When I recently spoke to Michael Bednar-Brandt, he made innovation initiatives sound quite a bit like practising for a marathon. Or rather, he made it crystal clear how innovation programs can easily fail if they are not treated more like a corporate fitness program instead of an innovation magic pill.
Michael works as Business Innovation expert at Oracle. Based out of Vienna, Austria, he has over 20 years of experience with innovation programs at both startups and large corporations and is a self-proclaimed corporate innovation demystifier. He is also our expert of the month.
Read more“Great. Now you can ask ‘would you like fries with that ?’ in seven languages”
This is what CJ Walker’s family and friends jokingly told her when she graduated as a linguist. Back then in the ’90s, the job market wasn’t exactly booming with demand for people trained at modelling and documenting language, but much has fortunately happened since then.
Following extensive work on user manuals and technical communication jobs at Alcatel, HP, the European Union, and Microsoft, in 2007 she founded Firehead, to focus exclusively on content recruitment and training. Since then, she has actively helped shape the content strategy community, trained and placed people in content jobs around the world.
She also helped organise the very first content strategy conference in Paris in 2010 and is our expert of the month.
Read more“People tend to look at the wrong numbers and misinterpret the results”
Robert Petković is known to get to the point and in our conversation, he’s straight-talking as expected when we talk about his take on digital marketing in 2021 and his background as one of the first full-time digital analysts in Croatia.
Today, his role is higher level as Digital Analytics Director at Pro media group in Zagreb, Croatia, where he focuses on data storytelling and website analysis for large corporates.
In his own words, he frequently draws on his psychology background to help understand human behaviour and from talking to Robert, it’s clear that we’ve come a long way in the past 20 years when it comes to website analytics, but we also still have a long way to go.
Robert is our expert of the month.
Read moreContent strategy in 2021 is changing as we are improving our understanding of both writing for the web and how content is consumed in today’s world
When I recently talked to Michael Andrews, I wasn’t surprised that we would talk about content, but I was reminded of how the explosion in channels is having a big impact on content. Michael shared his latest thinking on how customers are beefing up their content game and how we are moving away from web pages towards content as a living system.
Michael is Content Strategy Evangelist at Kentico Software, where he advises global enterprises on how to innovate their content practices and operations. Today he is based in Arlington, Virginia, but he has also lived and worked in India, UK, New Zealand and Italy. He is our expert of the month.
Read more“What are the key skills that Amazon or Google are looking for?
My conversation with New York-based Neal Stimler quickly turned to our shared appetite for learning and trying to understand what’s next. The top skills in high demand by the tech giants do shape much of the strategic initiatives and innovation happening. Understanding the key skills also help an interdisciplinary talent like Neal work with organisations to bridge the gap to the next level.
Neal now has almost a year under his belt as an executive management consultant in his firm Stimler Advantage. I’ve worked with Neal for over a decade and first met him when he with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in various content and digital roles.
He’s also worked a year as Head of Public Engagement at Auckland Art Gallery in New Zealand and worked as a consultant with Balboa Park Online Collaborative. He’s our expert of the month.
Read more“The way we have always thought about strategy is very centralised and top-down. That’s controlling and directive - and leads to very detailed strategic plans. We need to move towards something lighter, that is driven by shared-purpose.”
When I spoke to Boston-based Rachel Happe, I was naturally hoping she would elaborate on her memorable remark from 2018 on how control is for amateurs. As you can tell from the opening quote, what unfolded was not just a conversation about control and communities, but a fascinating perspective on its impact on business strategies, organisational structures and how we collaborate. Many executives are really struggling to be successful because organizational models are out of sync with the speed of information.
Rachel is the co-founder of The Community Roundtable and strongly believes in the power of community to enable human potential. She is our expert of the month.
Read more“Let the content folks do their job”
In my conversation with Ottawa-based Mark Demeny from Optimizely, the conversation quickly turned to how we can best empower content creators and site builders. There’s still too much thinking required according to Mark and that’s from someone who’s spent his working life since the late ’90s on web systems and digital platforms.
On February 1st, less than 2 months ago, Mark left Contentful and joined Episerver on Feb 1. Just one week later, Episerver renamed to Optimizely and Mark’s responsibility as Director, Product Management turned from Episerver CMS to what is now called the Optimizely Content Cloud.
At Optimizely he is collaborating with many of his former colleagues from his 8 years at Sitecore and on his to-do-list for the coming months is updating the product architecture and integration to the rest of the Optimizely suite. Mark is our expert of the month.
Read more“Why does your business exist digitally?”
It sounds like a simple question, but to many, it is actually quite difficult to answer. In particular, in large and complex organisations, depending on who you speak to, you’ll often find quite different answers.
In my recent conversation with Toronto-based Blair Roebuck, she shared her challenge of looking behind the numbers, finding the compromise between different views and opinions, yet only one website
According to Blair, every website has a purpose. If you are in B2B, it might be showing your authority or it might be all about lead generation. The trick is, that we are being measured on different outcomes and conversion doesn’t necessarily mean checking out in an e-commerce flow. Long story short: We’re often not measuring against the right metrics
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