About me & contact

Disclosure

This blog is about observations, commentary and thinking about good communication (and other stuff) centered around brand, employee engagement, and stuff like that.

I believe strategy, brand, engagement and communication are all integral and integrated elements to drive organizational performance and successful, sustainable transformation.

Up until 2015, I was Managing Director of London-based creative strategy / brand consultancy BrandPie. My particular role was brand-led organisational transformation, brand engagement, and employer branding. Most significantly, I coordinated the agency-side team that established EY’s new purpose-driven transformation that culminated around the idea of “Building a better working world.”

Previously I was Global Head of the MS&LGroup Brand & Talent Practice, hubbing out of my role as a Client Partner SAS, a London-based communication agency.  Prior to this I was Head of Engagement at WPP Global Brand Agency Enterprise IG (now The Brand Union).

I served on the UK board of the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC – www.iabc.com).

A bit about me
I started in marketing and PR but have spent the past 20 years in employee communications — typically, helping engage leaders and people in large scale, complex organisational change. I’ve worked for niche specialist consultancies and giant global consulting firms, and have lived and worked all over the world in various roles.

Along the way I accidentally developed expertise in intranets and using digital media to engage people, learned all about user centred design and usability, but most importantly learned that people in organisations collectively know more about the business than the business does. And we forget that too often.

I co-founded the UK Usability Professional Association (UK UPA) and the Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) and was a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (FRSA). I hold an MA in Social Science from the University of Denver, double first from the same institution, and am a graduate of the IPJ/ Georgetown University Insitute on Political Journalism. I am an Accredited Business Communicator, awarded by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC).

I’m excited about new social media and how it can be used to better engage employees and stakeholders, and also have some healthy scepticism about it … some of it reminds me of the dot com boom and money for old rope.

I believe that in our quest to measure and quantify employee engagement and communication we’ve lost sight of much of what matters and is important — helping people understand their roles and make it easier for them to participate and do their jobs.  What gets measured might get managed, but that model isn’t going to inspire a changing workforce in the coming decade.

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