Management Insights

The Journey Begins: Creating a Memorable Brand Introduction with the Right Name

24/06/2023 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

Article contributed by Grant Polachek

Launching a brand can be thrilling and essential to building a thriving business, but one key element in making that journey successful is creating an unforgettable brand introduction with the perfect name. A powerful name can leave lasting impressions, stir emotions, and shape consumer perception. This article explores their significance, effective startup strategies that leverage digital age influences, testing/evaluating procedures, and visual elements’ role in reinforcing brand name recognition.

Exploring Brand Name Power

The One Sentence Persuasion Strategy

21/12/2022 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

persuasion strategy An extract based on the One Sentence Persuasion Principle by Blair Warren

The first question to ask is whether it is even possible to have a one sentence persuasion strategy. How can it be that it is possible to capture and communicate anything of value about persuasion in just one sentence? This article proves that not only is this possible, it is an extremely powerful tool…

Top Negotiation Secrets

12/04/2022 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

The ability to negotiate well is perhaps one of the most vital skills for success in one’s life yet for most people, it is hard to understand how to become a better negotiator. The ability to negotiate is not some inherent aptitude that one has or does not have. It is, in fact,like all other skills one that can be acquired and honed over time. Here are the key things to remember in order to become an accomplished negotiator:

Psychology of Flow – Zone of High Performance

11/08/2021 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

You are out running in the park. Instead of your mind thinking about the office tasks on Monday, your attention is focused on the act of running and nothing else. You can feel the ground beneath your feet, the tension in your legs and how you are feeling as you breathe in and out. You are somehow completely focused on this and nothing else seems to matter. Suddenly you notice you have been running for twice as long as usual and you are not even tired.

psychology of flow

Self-Deception: The Leadership Curse

22/06/2021 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

This article is based on the concept of self-deception in the book Leadership and Self Deception by the Arbinger Institute.

I like to conduct this activity in some training courses where I ask the participants to rate themselves as leaders on a scale of 1 to 10. I ask them to write down the score they give to themselves on a piece of paper without showing the score to others. When everyone is done, I ask each individual to tell me their score and then plot this on a line on the board that goes from 1 to 10. 90% of the responses are usually between 7-9. This is people basically saying they’re very good but they hold back just a wee bit to show some humility by not scoring themselves as 10. You may find the odd outlier – a 3 or a 10 – but this is quite rare.

As I point out how all the responses lie within a very narrow zone, the participants start to laugh as they realize that there is a coincidence, a pattern here. I then ask them to do the same exercise but this time imagining how their colleagues would score them. This time, the zone is not 7-9, it is more like 4-6. The question I then ask them is “what is this distance between the 7-9 and 4-6 due to?” The answer of course is self-deception.

The Third Door

28/05/2021 / Asad Zaidi / 5 Comments

This is one of those articles you simply have to read. Arthur Rosenfeld, a Tai Chi Master, provides an amazing insight on how sometime it might be better not to rely on our instinctive and primitive emotions. Based on his article in the Huffington Post Blog

Just before Christmas of 2007, almost exactly a year ago, I steered into a Starbucks drive-thru line for a cup of tea on my way to teach a morning tai chi lesson. There were a few cars in line, and I got in behind them. When my turn came I gave my order at the billboard menu and moved up as far as I could while waiting patiently for the cars in front of me to get through the cashier line. While the South Florida weather would probably would have felt tropical to much of the rest of the country, I was a bit chilled and was looking forward to my hot drink.

tai chi

Building a Strategy – 5 Key Questions

15/04/2021 / Asad Zaidi / 0 Comments

Based on an article in Harvard Business Review by Roger Martin

Strategy is sometimes made out to be much more complex than it actually is. This is usually because of too much focus on complex-sounding tools like environmental scans, SWOT analysis, PEST analysis, financial modeling etc. Another issue seems to be that strategy is thought to be about some conceptual and deep into the future stuff. Building a strategy does not have to be a complex approach. We can simplify strategy by thinking of it as a set of answers to 5 interlinked questions in a specific sequence…

building a strategy