Weekly Posts and Insights

Part 3: How "Narrative Belonging" Should Define Today’s Brands for Millennials
Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington

Part 3: How "Narrative Belonging" Should Define Today’s Brands for Millennials

Let’s build out the Beloved Brand Triangle with thesis #3.  The final point on our triangle is narrative belonging.  Narrative Belonging is the ongoing effort by a brand to tell the story continually of how a customer that uses the brand will have a sense of belonging to the product and service that will greatly enhance the customer’s existence and experience.

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Why Millennials Need Authentic Trust in Their Products
Leadership, Culture Matthew Harrington Leadership, Culture Matthew Harrington

Why Millennials Need Authentic Trust in Their Products

The challenge for many companies is that the Millennial generation will hold you to your sales pitch.  The days of the “snake oil” salesman are dead.  For many companies, who are not entirely truthful, who lack competency and character in their business practices and product, they will rue the day that 93 million Millennials find out that they are in fact not telling the truth.  This generation, who has a rigorous demand for excellence, will hop on their social platforms and announce to the world that you are now deemed untrustworthy.

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Millennials and Their Rigorous Demand for Excellence in Brands
Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington

Millennials and Their Rigorous Demand for Excellence in Brands

Millennials. Brands. Trust. Three things that seemingly go together, yet each one has its own origin story.  Exploring each one is the task at hand for the next month and a half as we prepare for the Relate Live New York City conference on October 22-23.  How we fit these massive topics all into a 45 minute presentation, giving each one its own stage time, while connecting the dots, threading the narrative through all of them to come away with useful insights and nuggets of knowledge for conference goers will be our challenge.

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Tasks, Processes and Relationships
Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington

Tasks, Processes and Relationships

There are always three things going on in any transaction or more importantly group/team/department/company: tasks, processes, and relationships. You can imagine that most of us focus a majority of our time on tasks (60%), A good organization focuses some of their energy on good processes (30%). This leaves about 10% just to focus on relationships which is actually the hardest and perhaps the most important thing to focus on as companies can always make a new machine, a new process, more tasks, but it's culture and people make up the differential factor between a good company and a great company.

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XPollination (Ep. 20) - Millennials and Talent Development
Leadership, Culture Matthew Harrington Leadership, Culture Matthew Harrington

XPollination (Ep. 20) - Millennials and Talent Development

Today we have special guest Bruce Tulgan, bestselling author of It's Okay to Be the Boss, Not Everyone Gets a Trophy and his most recent book, Bridging the Soft Skills Gap, joining us for our 20th episode. Bruce is internationally recognized as the leading expert on young people in the workplace and one of the leading experts on leadership and management. Bruce has worked with tens of thousands of leaders and managers in hundreds of organizations ranging from Aetna to Wal-Mart; from the Army to the YMCA.  Bruce was named by Management Today as one of the few contemporary figures to stand out as a “management guru.” Bruce also lectures at the Yale Graduate School of Management and writes articles for many different associations including TRAINING magazine and the Huffington Post.  Before founding his company, RainmakerThinking in 1993, Bruce practiced law at the Wall Street firm of Carter, Ledyard & Milburn.

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XPollination (Ep. 19) - Millennial Grit and Resilience
Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington Culture, Leadership Matthew Harrington

XPollination (Ep. 19) - Millennial Grit and Resilience

As a dynamic consultant, coach, and educator, Sarah Scala has over 15 years of experience in supporting organization development, leadership, and change management for diverse organizations. She is passionate about creating solutions that strengthen interpersonal skills and support change with individuals, teams, and organizations.

We met when Sarah was giving a presentation on “Sustaining Success through Mindfulness, Optimism, Resilience and Grit.”  I was especially interested around the topic of resilience and grit and how Millennials fit into the equation.  Do we have resilience and grit as a generation?  Most older generations would argue that these core elements are lacking in this generation?  Can we build grit and resilience? 

So we invited Sarah onto the show to discuss with us a bit more about resilience, grit and success.  

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