Do you want to create a leading brand?

Then Al Ries is your man. Al is the legendary marketing strategist who co-authored a series of articles declaring the arrival of the Positioning Era in 1972. Positioning is about how to place your brand in the mind of a consumer in a crowded marketplace, and this concept has revolutionized how people view branding.

Al is the bestselling author of 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It.

In our conversation, we talk about what it takes to make a brand truly flourish, which often defies logic and conventional wisdom:

• How to be the leading brand – the Heinz, Starbucks, Red Bull or Gatorade – of your category
• What people will remember after reading a magazine with 200 ads – and what this means for your brand
• Why doing things different is more important than doing things better than the competition
• How to increase profits by focusing on a single concept (find out why Nintendo is more profitable than Sony)

Learn more about Al at www.ries.com.

Listen to my interview with Al Ries

Here’s a full and frank declaration: Andrea J Lee’s one of my very favourite people on the planet. She’s as funny as she is generous as she is smart as she is innovative. She’s been hanging out at the edge of coaching and also what it means to be a thought leader for as long as I’ve know her.

She was the COO of CoachVille, then the largest coaching community in the world. She’s written several books, the most recent being Money, Meaning and Beyond. She runs large events engaging people on the quest to be a thought-leader and a successful entrepreneur. And she’s constantly practicing what she preaches as she reinvents herself and her business time and time again.

In our time together we chat about:

• How the Tiananeman Square protests – Andrea was in China at the time – helped awake one of the deepest choices about Great Work
• The power of ‘galvanizing energy’ – and how to find it
• An inspirational insight from Buckminster Fuller that will help you play your life out fully
• And why cleanliness is so much more than a good bar of soap

The doorway to her various enterprises – including her blog – is www.AndreaJLee.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @andreajlee

Listen to my interview with Andrea J Lee

I’ve spent a number of years in the “OD” space – thinking about organizational development, how companies change and evolve, what it takes to engage and inspire people who work in those organizations.

And I reckon I know a fair bit. That is, until I talk to someone like Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge. I was lucky enough to meet her through a colleague who told me in no uncertain terms, this is a woman who is deeply wise and deeply compassionate about people and organizations and change. Mee-Yan is the founder of Quality and Equality and has worked with more than 300 different types of clients from her base in the UK. She has written numerous OD articles and is the UK lead for the NTL Institute, the pre-eminent force for training and developing folks to know about OD.

We talk about:

• the key moment when she stopped tolerating Good Work – and how she changed things around
• why self-work is the foundation for the impact you have in the world
• how to raise your eyes to see where you might have impact in the world
• the six steps to achieve a deep sense of self

You can learn more about Mee-Yan and her company Quality and Equality here.

Listen to my interview with Mee-Yan Cheung-Judge

“Doing a straight-forward, clear-cut task
that has a beginning and an end
balances out the complexity-without-end
that often vexes the rest of my life.
Sacred simplicity.”
~ Robert Fulghum

A book I haven’t yet read is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. But I’ve read about it, and I believe that this is its premise…

In our busy working lives, we’ve lost the connection from start to finish. With no sense of beginning or ending, we’re trapped in a cycle of getting things done and horizon-less productivity. We swept up into the complexity of our organization and – quite frankly – it’s sapping us of life, meaning, purpose, happiness.

And if that’s not it, maybe I should write a book that tackles that very challenge.

It happens slyly, quietly. The complexity and distraction seeps in like moisture, the freezes and cracks the rock of concentration.

Even as I’ve been writing this post, I’ve found my attention grabbed by other things – email wanting to be checked, my to-do list waiting to be tweaked, up and down to pack my bag for a coming trip.

How do you connect with the bigger picture, so your tasks have purpose?

How can you break what you do down to tasks that begin and end?

How do you maintain your focus to begin and end a task?

Jason Fried’s new book Rework comes out today, and I’m delighted that we managed to talk just a week ago in the lead up to its launch. Now here’s a quote to kick us off. It’s from Seth Godin, and he says (and I’m paraphrasing), “Make everything a project – and run it through 37Signals’ Basecamp.” Jason is the one of the founders of 37Signals. They design useful software to help people work better – connect with people, run projects, managing stuff. (I know, because I use it!)

And what’s cool is they haven’t done it by practising business as usual, but by practising business as unusual. In this interview Jason shares some of his successful and counter-intutive approaches to how to get stuff done. We talk about:

• The evolution of 37Signals – and why where you start is not where you finish
• The value of introducing “done enough” as a measure of success
• The problem with meetings – and what to do about it
• Why planning is highly overrated
• And a bunch more…

You can pick up the new book on Amazon , follow Jason on Twitter at @JasonFried, and learn more about 37 Signals’ products at their website.

Listen to my interview with Jason Fried

(And by the way, Jason’s surname is pronounced “Freed” – Apologies to Jason, and please ignore my mistake at the start of the interview!)