The last lesson I’m going to share with you/burden you with from our Disney experience is this: there’s always someone watching. The signs on the ‘no entry’ doors at Disney don’t read ‘Staff Only’, they read ‘Cast Members Only’. Every single person who works in Disneyland – the poor sweating souls in the Disney costumes, […]
Continue readingYou’d think if any company had reached a point where it could rest on its laurels, it would be Disney. One of the biggest brands in the world, with perhaps the most iconic, recognisable characters in the world of entertainment, a slick operation, massive profits. And yet, it never stops. When Walt Disney opened Disneyland […]
Continue readingI said yesterday I’d learned a few things about business in those few crazy family days at Disneyland Paris – here’s the first. Mickey Mouse started as a cartoon character. (Stay with me.) When he was created, back in 1928, the primary channel for distribution was via the picture houses, where cartoon shorts were shown […]
Continue readingWe’ve been in Disneyland Paris for the last few days, and I’m writing this on the ferry back home, feeling like I need another holiday to recover. Our favourite ride – I lost count of the number of times we queued for it – was Big Thunder Mountain, a rollercoaster pretending to be an out-of-control […]
Continue readingI recorded the intro and outro for Episode 77 of The Extraordinary Business Book Club yesterday, which was slightly surreal (you’ll understand why when you listen on Monday), which features an interview with Bridget Shine, CEO of the Independent Publishers Guild in the UK. She’s absolutely at the sharp end of publishing, and it’s a […]
Continue readingAnother great quote today from William Zinsser’s On Writing Well (and no apologies – it’s genius and the only reason I’m not quoting the whole thing at you sentence by sentence is my high regard for copyright law): ‘The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that […]
Continue readingAs part of my book-for-every-year-of-my-life challenge, I’ve reached 1976 and William Zinsser’s classic On Writing Well (although I’ve cheated slightly as I bought the 7th edition, published 2006). William Zinsser is the guy with the great quote – ‘Writing, learning and thinking are the same process.’ – but I didn’t know too much about him […]
Continue readingYesterday I focused on the entrepreneurial aspect of Warren Knight’s story (you can listen to the full interview here), but today I want to mention an interesting aspect of his approach to publishing his book Think #Digital First: he very consciously took the decision to use a partner publisher, to buy in their expertise but […]
Continue readingIn this week’s podcast episode, I talk to Warren Knight, speaker, consultant and author of Think #Digital First (you can listen to the full interview here). What really struck me in our conversation was the way in which Warren exemplified the entrepreneurial mindset, even as a very young man. He saw opportunities and took them, […]
Continue readingCreating a book cover is an exciting part of the publishing process, but also a notoriously difficult one. Sometimes authors know exactly what they want and are able to give the designer a clear brief: most times it’s a dance that goes backwards and forwards a few times. I’ve found creating my cover a particularly […]
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