By Gary Turner, managing director, Xero, the online platform for small businesses and their advisors, and Fourteen Forty client
Very often small firms do not need external investment to grow. They need working capital. That was one of the key messages that came out of a stakeholder and media event that we recently held to launch Xero Small Business Insights.
By Joy Frascinella, head of PR, the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)
Antibiotic resistance, caused by the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, is a very real and growing threat to human health worldwide. It is estimated to claim approximately 100,000 lives in the US and Europe every year. The numbers are much higher in developing countries.
Read More “Investors are waking up to the risks posed by antibiotic resistance”
By Guy Corbet, Fourteen Forty
The researchers at professional services firm EY reveal four fifths (82%) of us believe a brand’s values must include a clear purpose. This purpose is critical in deciding whether or not we will buy from them.
Read More “Do brands really need a “social purpose” to do good?”
You’ve had this conversation before.
Maybe over supper with friends, your family or a colleague at work.
You’ll make the case for business and free enterprise more broadly. Companies support 82% of all employment in this country. They provide the taxes that essential public services depend on, you’ll add.
In 1973 Stanford Professor Mark Granovetter’s “the strength of weak ties” argued that weak links, between people with different opinions, help new and unfamiliar ideas spread.
Strong ties bind friends and families. They encourage group think and build echo chambers. They deter people from thinking broadly, or seeing other perspectives. Strong ties lock you in.
Read More “Weak Links #2: brands, holocaust, art, apologies”
By Guy Corbet
The Apology Clause campaign has been set up to make it easier for businesses to behave with compassion when things go wrong, and to help victims have better recoveries.
That is because too often, when it feels like a business should say sorry, it does not. This may be to a customer who has been let down, or someone who might have had a right to expect better than they received.
We talk to Zoe Fenn, director at Flamingo, the global insight and brand consultancy, about how brands need to adapt to stay ahead.
Q: Zoe, there’s been a lot of talk around the death of the brand, do you think this holds water?
Zoe Fenn: Not at all. Of course, some of the really big brands that have been around for a long time will fade. So will many of the new ones.
It’s always been that way. The brand graveyard always gets bigger. But that’s different to the death of the brand.
Read More “Consistency is the key for brands to meet the test of time”
By Julie Kangisser, Think Communications
Is the Holocaust merely a detail of history? This view is rearing its head on the fringes of mainstream political discourse in a number of European countries.
Within a few years there will be no surviving witnesses of the Holocaust. Second-generation survivors are increasingly feeling compelled to combat the propaganda, hate speech and crisis rhetoric of many leaders today. The same goes for, those who have survived recent genocides such as those in Darfur, Rwanda and Bosnia.
By Victoria Tate, director of Arterial
Art appreciation is often dismissed as a leisure activity rather than something which has a wider value to society and commerce. It is an activity that ladies who lunch, debutantes and retired people get up to. Art is seen as relaxing, something that goes hand in hand with travel, lunching and bucket-list museum visiting. Art has been denied the status and role it could achieve in the sphere of non-leisure pursuits, in the world of work.
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts”, said the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.
