Always consider if someone before you has said it better! Communicator of the Week Award goes to my friend, Alex Ktorides for the moving eulogy he gave on the sad passing of his father. Eulogies are tough to get right. Should you go through the whole life of the departed one or just give snippets? Should you be funny or sombre or a mixture of both? Do you let your emotions show or button them up to get through it? And what theme can you use to tie it all together? Alex’s answer to the ‘what...
16 days ago • 1 min read
Sometimes, the cruelty is the point! Communicator of the Week Award goes to Shabana Mahmood (the new Home Secretary), who this week set out the Labour Party's new strategy to tackle the perennial political problem of immigration. Labour has an identity problem. Its roots are working class. Its heart is progressive. Its head is neo-liberal. And its fear is that it is being outflanked by the far right. What to do? Whether the new approach to immigration she announced will work is way above my...
23 days ago • 1 min read
Message discipline matters. Communicator of the Week Award goes to newly elected New York Mayor, Zohran Mamdani. There is a lot of excitement about the new young Mayor. He is a good-looking, eloquent, social media savvy progressive politician. No doubt the excitement over his election will fade once the reality of governing vs the fantasy of campaigning comes into stark focus. But there is one simple reason that Mamdani won (and won handily). Despite the wide-ranging attacks from the...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
You wouldn’t think that a made up YouTube golf competition would provide some of the most dramatic storylines in sporting history. But it did. And it led to one of the greatest motivational speeches ever given in sports. Communicator of the Week Award goes to Coach Jon Gruden for his inspirational rallying cry in the middle of the ‘Luke Kwon’ incident. Quick summary: Luke Kwon is a YouTube golfer influencer with about 400K subscribers. He entered a Ryder Cup style YouTube golf competition...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
When your leadership and example matters, your mistakes can have greater consequences. Mis-Communicator of the Week Award goes to Reform UK (Kent County Council) for the debacle of their zoom council meeting, which was leaked to the papers this week. Reform have a credibility challenge. People are angry with the status quo and Reform have very effectively stepped into that gap with a message that panders to fears and promises change. But now they are in government in Kent County Council, they...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
In his seminal work on the art of rhetoric, Aristotle identified that there were 3 cornerstones of persuasion: Logos (the use of logic), Pathos (the appeal to emotion), and Ethos (the credibility and character of the speaker). Communicator of the Week Award goes to US President Donald Trump for the considerable part he played to secure the tentative Gaza peace deal. You may (as many do) consider Donald Trump to be an unpredictable, unprincipled, uncouth autocrat, but where all the parties on...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Golf is hard at the best of times! But when you're playing in the biggest tournament in the world, against the best players in the world, with the pride of your country or continent on the line, golf requires Herculean levels of effort, focus and concentration. The job of fans is to support their own team and to give some stick to the opposition. But as with all communication, you have to match your tone to the moment. 'Go in the hole!' when one of your players has just hit - fine ✅ Shouting...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Martin Luther King once said ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.’ MisCommunicator of the Week Award goes to Disney as the corporation bent the knee to the Trump administration and cancelled the hugely popular Jimmy Kimmel show in the wake of Kimmel’s comments after the murder of Charlie Kirk. To be sure, the Disney Corporation made a calculated business decision that it was...
3 months ago • 1 min read
‘Character is what you do when you think no one is watching’ Miscommunicator of the Week Award goes to Polish millionaire Piotr Szczerek, who was captured snatching the autographed cap of tennis star Kamil Majchrzak from the young fan that Kamil was handing it to. Piotr clearly assumed no one was watching but someone’s camera was, and then the internet did its thing to identify him, and then flood his and his company’s social media with clap back insult and vitriol. His paving company will...
4 months ago • 1 min read