Category Archives: Uncategorized

Turn AI chatbots into better writing partners: a step-by-step guide for the less famous

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This simple process, taking as little as 15–30 minutes with the majority of the work done by the AI, creates a bespoke tool that enhances all your future AI-assisted writing.

The approach

Prof Scott Galloway mentioned in a recent podcast how, while feeling unhappy with the ending of a column he wrote one night, he asked a chatbot to write an alternative ending paragraph in his style and was pleasantly surprised by the result.

Writers often have mixed feelings about the fact that AI models have been trained on their writing. The silver lining for them is that when well-known writers work with AI, they can ask it to write in their style and get better results. But what about the rest of us?

As someone who values both creativity and strategic thinking, I’ve always been meticulous about my writing. To be honest, it’s probably the reason why I’m not as prolific as many others. 🤷 When I started using AI tools like ChatGPT, I quickly encountered a different limitation — how generic both style and advice can get. Of course, I could prompt: “Rewrite this post in a style combining the best of Mark Ritson and Malcolm Gladwell”, but what would be the point? I want my writing to be in my voice and to reflect my specific views and needs.

My objective was to ensure the chatbots helped me maintain my unique voice and thought process. I wanted them to assist me not only as copyeditors and proofreaders but also to be more useful as sparring partners while not wasting my time with views I fundamentally reject. I also wanted a tool that would allow me to “prime” the AI and start writing immediately without wasting time on repetitive tasks each time I start a new project.

To do this, I used the AI to create a personalised writing guide for the AI.

The process I used is straightforward and could be useful for anyone looking to collaborate effectively with AI. Today, I’m sharing how you can do the same, with the AI doing most of the heavy lifting.

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Reroll to rule with ChatGPT (and the others)

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Will people ever stop using AI wrong? 🤖
Ha!
Discover why you can expect AI to be inaccurate across a broad range of business and marketing subjects.

(I’m not an AI evangelist nor a Luddite.
Nuanced opinions don’t sell on LinkedIn, especially with hyped topics.
But I’m going to keep trying anyway. 🤷‍♂️)

Here’s a simple experiment that shows why it’s risky to treat AI chatbots as founts of knowledge, especially in marketing and business.

I asked gpt4 and Bard a straightforward question posed by a client:
“What are the leading models and frameworks for mapping customer journeys?” 💡

The twist? I generated answers three times for each.

Results?
• High variability in gpt4’s responses, with differing list lengths and items.
• Over-indexing of thought leaders with large publishing volume / PR.
• Influential Nielsen-Norman group framework appeared only once.
• Bard’s anonymized labels made lists nearly useless.
• Both occasionally included loosely related concepts (e.g., AIDA)

Why does this matter? 🤔
On a practical level, result variance indicates if you’re in the AI’s comfort zone or twilight zone and how much fact-checking is needed. High variance? Be cautious!

But there’s a bigger issue. With many flavours and branded versions of customer journey mapping, LLMs struggle to find clear dominant patterns. This issue is common in marketing, strategy, and business concepts.

Let’s not force AI into corners. It’s just not a great desk research tool at this point. Regenerate and iterate for better clarity. 💡

(Version 1.5 of “the sceptic’s guide to ChatGPT” is out)

The dance of creative leadership: 5 principles of facilitating flow (uncut version) 

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Illustration by The Partners

 

This article was originally published on Virgin’s Entrepreneur. However, as they were looking for a blog post, it had to be cut in half, with the models, one principle cut out and another central idea removed. I’m bringing it here because I think there is value in the deeper stuff.
Read the other version if you want something more top-line or if that to much, here’s a TL;DR:
Creative leadership can be seen as the facilitation of Flow. To achieve it you have to engage the full organisation and carefully navigate conflicting elements/agendas. 

(If you want to publish it on your platform, let me know.)

Another impossible demand?

The demands from leadership have never been higher. The focus on performance is still there, but across many sectors, the environment is more volatile and disruptive than it has ever been. Vision is no longer enough; a leader should instil his or her team with a sense of purpose. Innovation used to belong at the start of a process, now it’s continuous. And, of course, as we shift away from patriarchal views of leadership as inherently masculine, we add emotional intelligence, empathy, intuition, social awareness and so on…

And now there’s creativity, without which there will be no innovation (which, to an extent is the practical application of creativity). While innovation has many models and processes, creativity, which should generate the ideas that drive innovation, remains more enigmatic. How do you manage something so mysterious and ‘fluffy’? Is there a method to it? Is it simply down to the leader being creative, or is it about them leading the organisation’s creativity, or both?

When discussing old-school leadership vs contemporary leadership practices, some stereotypes are very much alive. That’s a shame, because if, when we’re talking about the new demands on leadership, we simply contrast them with a Machiavellian command and control straw-man, we will not push the new paradigm far enough, and we’ll miss the big picture. Instead, we should take a more integrative view.

Here are five principles that draw on both ancient and new leadership approaches.

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Déjà vu: Why B2B brand portfolios are descending into chaos, again.

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Illustration by The Partners

 

[Sometimes I get asked to write stuff and feel the marketing strategy equivalent of those famous protest signs that read ‘I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit’…]

Nearly 20 years ago, global M&A sprees combined with massive product innovation required the likes of Unilever and Nestlé to carefully assess their portfolios as well as scrutinise any arguments for the creation of new brands.

In February 2000, Unilever famously embarked on a global programme to reduce its number of brands from 1600 to 400 in five years. Coining the term ‘power brands’, Unilever shifted budgets from smaller, local, regional or niche brands to brands like Dove and Persil. It also leveraged the ice-cream Heartbrand to connect local heritage brands (Walls in the UK, Algida in Italy, Langnese in Germany, for example) and act as a platform for international powerhouses (Magnum, Cornetto, Solero, for example) across more than 40 countries.

Telecoms quickly followed suit and we experienced a shift from a world where even an audience-specific mobile tariff would have its own brand to largely monolithic portfolios across the entire sector. Today, you would struggle to point out a non-endorsed sub-brand for one of the major telecom brands.

FMCG companies may not be monolithic, but all the major players increased the prominence of their corporate brand endorsement over the last decade. Nowadays, most of the revenue of Unilever and P&G is estimated to come from a combined group of about 30 brands.

It’s ironic, then, that many of the consultancies behind those famous portfolio efficiency projects are holding increasingly proliferated brand portfolios that are straining not just marketing budgets and internal resources, but the amount of attention they can command in the market. Continue reading →

Are career paths still relevant?

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People used to think career paths are to be selected like a holiday from a stack of brochures, now it’s clear we must forge our own

image by: The Partners

 

According to that old-fashioned approach, your career path was something you chose, like selecting a holiday from a stack of brochures. Maybe things were once this straightforward; maybe it’s all a cultural myth. Nonetheless, this type of model hasn’t been applicable for the last couple of decades, and the way careers are shaped now, it’s likely to move even further away from it in the future.

In today’s work environment, and in the foreseeable future, your career path is something you have to forge. There are many reasons behind this change. Let’s start with the digital tools that have become prevalent in the corporate world — word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and general information management. A new base business literacy has emerged: everyone is expected to master these tools. It’s no longer enough to be able to work with and on multiple platforms: these tools constantly develop and change and employees are expected to adapt quickly to the new software.

The pace of technological change is compounded by the financial volatility we’ve seen over the last two decades. The cycles of boom and bust are becoming shorter and whole industries are experiencing disruption to their business models. Many of us will encounter instances of working for a business that goes under. And even if your company survives, redundancies are common: many will know the feeling of being made redundant by a changing business, despite strong personal performance.

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