Make that walkabout a priority | Brigadoon Weekend

Walkabout.png

Make that walkabout a priority - Your imagination will thank you

Made famous in the United States by famed Australian philosopher Crocodile Dundee, a walkabout is a journey through the wilderness of one's choosing to satisfy an itch, a desire to be elsewhere, the craving for the open road, or to engage the space over the horizon.

A walkabout can be a simple bike ride to your local art museum or possibly a more adventurous cross-continental journey to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. A walkabout can be joining the local historical society or taking a gap year to teach economics in Canada.

Regardless of the distance traveled or the actions taken, your imagination will thank you for the change of scenery.

The brain gets too comfortable in your everyday surroundings.

Same morning routine. Same office commute. Same weekly meetings. Same quarterly reports. Same yearly industry conference.

Sameness overload.

This sameness can suppress your ability to generate new ideas.

Without generating new ideas, you become a manager and not a leader.

Changing up the pace, the people, and poetry can have profound results from developing new skills and insights and your ability to generate new ideas.

You are a mashup of what you let into your life - friends, meals, music, books, art, lectures, movies, experiences, etc.

Every new idea is a mashup of one or more previous ideas, without developing new ideas, the mashup process stalls.

So make time for that walkabout.

Big or small, your imagination will thank you.

-Marc

WHAT BRIGADOON IS WATCHING THIS WEEKEND

‘Welcome to the mesh, brother’: Guerrilla wi-fi comes to New York: NYC Mesh, a band of a few dozen tech volunteers, takes on Verizon and the big “incumbent providers,” with the promise of inexpensive community internet.
NYT

EU plans to plant three billion trees under forestry strategy: The bloc is proposing to use the Common Agricultural Policy to set up payment schemes for the owners of woodland, while boosting the monitoring of existing forest, which makes up around two-fifths of the continent. The European Commission, the EU’s regulator, is also planning to plant 3 billion trees in an effort to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.
Bloomberg

Copenhagenize your city: The case for urban cycling in 12 graphs: Danish-Canadian urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen busts some common myths and shows how the bicycle has the potential to transform cities around the world.
Guardian

Former Sony, Toyota engineers accelerate Japan aerospace startups: Experience with jets and robots advances 'flying cars' and moon exploration.
Nikkei

Moderna’s next act is using mRNA vs. flu, zika, HIV, and cancer: The biotech has reached a $100 billion market cap. But after COVID, the challenges get even bigger.
Bloomberg

"Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol. Anticipated spending on experiences such as leisure travel and dining is outpacing spending on goods... a direct response to the proliferation of screens." -- Nellie Bowles - technology reporter for The New York Times.

The novel material that’s shrinking phone chargers, powering up electric cars, and making 5G possible: Gallium, once an industrial-waste product, is transforming our increasingly electrified world.
Christopher Mims - WSJ


Like this content? Sample Brigadoon Daily for a week. Drop me an email and get added to the distribution list for a week. marc@thebrigadoon.com

Five reasons you should be Brigadoon Member:

  • A discount for you and a plus one to all Brigadoon events, workshops, remotes, retreats, and salon dinners

  • Delivered monthly, one highly curated book on leadership, performance, marketing, or public affairs

  • A quarterly deck covering emerging issues, business model disruption, globalization, or behavioral economics

  • Access to a global network of entrepreneurs and independent thinkers to test ideas and engage a private audience

  • You are an entrepreneur and independent thinker who needs more global street smarts

Join here for as low as $150 a month, and for peace of mind, you cancel whenever you get bored or find the membership trite.

Thanks for supporting Brigadoon. See you next week.

-Marc

Curation + commentary by Marc A. Ross | Founder + Chief Curator @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon is Global Street Smarts

More @ thebrigadoon.com

Good pod this: Chris Fussell speaks with Sean DeLaney

The pod covers much ground, including:

Fussell's 15 years with the US Navy SEALs and his work at the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute...

His experience as Aide-de-Camp to Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal during McChrystal’s final year commanding a Joint Special Operations Task Force fighting Al Qaeda around the globe...

Insights on his book, One Mission: How Leaders Build a Team of Teams...

What it is like to teach at Yale University’s Jackson Institute...

Chris was commissioned as an Officer in the United States Navy in 1997, and spent the next 15 years on US Navy SEAL Teams, leading SEAL elements in combat zones around the globe. From war-torn Kosovo, to counter-terrorism operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to highly specialized efforts in the troubled areas of the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa, he experienced and led through the modern evolution of the US military’s Special Operations community, first on SEAL Teams Two and Eight, then in the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

Chris was selected to serve as Aide-de-Camp to then-Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal during General McChrystal’s final year commanding the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), where they served for a year together in Iraq. He witnessed first-hand the Special Operations community’s transformation into a successful, agile network.

Chris is also a Senior Fellow for National Security at New America, a Washington, DC-based non-partisan think tank dedicated to understanding the next generation of challenges facing the United States. Chris is actively involved in several non-profits dedicated to helping veterans and their families, and holds a seat on the Board of Directors for the Navy SEAL Foundation. He is also a lifetime member to the Council on Foreign Relations.

Chris earned a Master of Arts in Irregular Warfare from the Naval Postgraduate School, receiving the Pat Tillman Award for highest peer-rated Special Operations Officer in the program. His thesis work focused on the interagency collaboration and intelligence sharing processes that drove effective, cross-silo collaboration during the peak of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Good pod this.

Listen here.

Why do things go wrong in organizations?

Why do things go wrong in organizations?

Easy question.

Hard answer?

Or is it a hard question and easy answer?

Christian Hunt has some thoughts.

Christian has over 25 years of experience in financial services, working in investment banking, asset management, and a family office.

Serious dude.

He benefits from the unique perspective of having held senior roles as both a regulator and risk + compliance officer.

Plus he was Managing Director & Head of Behavioural Science at UBS, a role created specifically for him.

Told you, serious dude.

Only space for 20 enrollees.

The cost is $45.00.

The session is 45 minutes starting at 2:00 pm ET on Wednesday, August 18, 2021.

You in?

Ticket Here
77627d39-51ad-86e4-7ff9-2fe49106227d.jpeg

Think STOCK. Do STOCK. | Brigadoon Weekend

image-asset (2).jpeg

Think STOCK. Do STOCK.

Communications is the spreading of an idea.

STOCK is the process for the spreading of an idea.

STOCK = Strategy, Tactics, Organization, Consistency, and Know-how.

This is a model I use for clients and my projects.

I hope this framework gives you the structure to drop a new idea into the world.

Strategy

"Strategy is an idea that describes a journey to a position of advantage." -- Blair Enns

"Strategy is the answer to the question, 'How are we going to become and remain unique?" -- Michael Porter

Your strategy should be easily summable into an idea.

From the idea, you should be able to infer some essential steps which will propel the business.

The ultimate aim of strategy is a position of advantage in the market space.

Also, there is a difference between a business strategy and a brand strategy.

A business strategy is about making the organization unique.

A brand strategy is the same idea applied to a brand. There's a distinction between the two only when one business owns multiple brands.

Plus, a one-brand business does not need a "brand strategy." It needs a communication and/or marketing plan.

P&G and GM need brand strategies. You are probably not P&G or GM.

Tactics

What are the tools, tactics, platforms, events, and methods, etc. which we going to use to execute our strategy?

Tactics are tools - things you do to win customers, win in the market space.

Repeat, tactics are tools.

If you start using tools/tactics without a clear strategy, who knows where you will end up.

Organization

What are the systems, what is the process, who is on the team?

Who is responsible for what?

Who is doing what when?

Answering these questions is all about employing solid organization.

Consistency

Can you form a habit with your customers?

Can you create an environment where they expect, demand, need your service?

Developing and executing a predictable editorial calendar that takes advantage of the calendar happenings, cultural activities/engagements, and natural inflection points are wonderful for communications and marketing.

Know-how

What expertise, knowledge, insights, humanity, behind the scenes are you sharing and providing to your network, customers, and market space?

Adam Grant posted this on Twitter recently:

Creating knowledge without sharing it is elitism.

Sharing knowledge without creating it is marketing.

Creating knowledge to share it is thought leadership.

That is a pretty good explanation of thought leadership and know-how.

What idea are you holding back?

-Marc

WHAT BRIGADOON IS WATCHING THIS WEEKEND

Renting clothes is ‘less green than throwing them away’: Transportation and dry cleaning make it the worst green option for consumers of fashion, study finds.
Guardian

Should we "nudge nature" to help animals save themselves? What should we do when animals can't adapt to meet the challenges we present?
Marc Bekoff Ph.D.

Copenhagenize your city: The case for urban cycling in 12 graphs: Danish-Canadian urban designer Mikael Colville-Andersen busts some common myths and shows how the bicycle has the potential to transform cities around the world.
Guardian

What if everyone’s nutrition was personalized? How the mass adoption of personalized nutrition is changing people’s health—and the food industry. An imagined scenario from 2035.
Economist

The race to scale up green hydrogen: Long heralded as an alternative to fossil fuels, can the gas really help solve the world’s dirtiest energy problems?
FT

Like this content? Become a Brigadoon Member starting at just $150 a month and get 45+ articles, news reports, surveys, and insights like this 5x week.

Plus:

  • A discount for you and a plus one to all Brigadoon events, workshops, remotes, retreats, and salon dinners

  • Delivered monthly, one highly curated book on leadership, performance, marketing, or public affairs

  • A quarterly deck covering emerging issues, business model disruption, globalization, or behavioral economics

  • Access to a global network of entrepreneurs and thought leaders to test ideas and engage a private audience

Join here for as low as $150 a month, and for peace of mind, you cancel whenever you get bored or find the membership trite.

Thanks for supporting Brigadoon. See you next week.

-Marc

Curation + commentary by Marc A. Ross | Founder + Chief Curator @ Brigadoon

Brigadoon is Global Street Smarts

More @ thebrigadoon.com