uniqueness Archive - Lead with Clarity. Communicate with Impact.

Selling diamonds

All too often, corporate messaging suffers from – let’s be straight – bullshitting. Promising the blue from the skies, using fluffy statements, and decorating vague claims with some sweet candy and cream.

One of the reasons for this is that these corporations think that great messaging can fix inferior products.

And maybe it can.

But I think it pays much more to fix your product first. To make sure that you’re actually selling diamonds.

If you’re selling a diamond, you don’t need to decorate it. You wouldn’t even want to. You much rather polish it to surface its pure beauty. You wouldn’t ever hide it underneath layers of fluff and stuff to make it appear more beautiful. It’s already pure beauty.

When you’re selling a “diamond” product, your communication becomes way easier. You just need to speak the truth, in plain English, making clear statements and bold promises.

Helping women get the career they deserve

This is part 3 of the series on leaders who light the path – a group of extraordinary people doing work that matters. All of them have been pioneers in going through my new masterclass “Leaders Light the Path” which will open to the public this fall.

Let’s face it: We’re still miles away from getting close to equality for women in corporate careers. Phaedra Romney has taken on no smaller task than to change that.

If you look a little bit closer at the advice that’s out there, one can get the impression that still, mostly the advice is for women to become more like men. Weird, to say the least.

Phaedra has a different approach. She doesn’t want women to hide behind a façade or have to compete on men’s terms, but instead embrace who they are. Her “Ally in a Corner” program is designed to do exactly that: By building a community of like-minded, ambitious women she helps women get the support they need to get the career they deserve.

In our Interview, I’ve spoken with Phaedra about what’s still wrong after so many years and how a better path for ambitious women might look like. Read her fascinating story.

After she took my masterclass, Phaedra told me that she feels so empowered because she found her voice and the courage to trust in it. She said it gave her wings. If you want to experience the same, I would love for you to consider joining the first public edition of the “Leaders Light the Path” masterclass. It launches October, 26th.

Uncovering your uniqueness

As if there hadn’t been enough challenges for businesses already, such as digitisation, climate change and many more, the last year brought an even bigger disruption: the pandemic. It disrupted many business models with long term consequences.

To better understand what businesses need to do to be able to adapt to these changing conditions, Prof. Tim Bruysten and his team conducted the “future study” – an extensive effort with hundreds of businesses and leaders from a wide range of different industries.

One of the most surprising findings for me was that while many companies believe that there is some kind of uniqueness to them, only 4% – one out of 25 – believes that their customers get what this uniqueness is.

I wanted to dig deeper here and invited Tim as a guest to the “Leaders Who Light The Path” series. Tim is the founder of richtwert which helps businesses prepare for the future by gaining clarity about who they truly are, what makes them special and how they can build trust from that uniqueness. We talked extensively about why that is and how a better path might look like for these companies.

Read the full interview to learn more about the fascinating outcomes of the future study here.

PS: This interview is part of the “Leaders Who Light The Path” series. If you’d like to suggest a leader to be interviewed, please get in touch.

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Selling diamonds

Helping women get the career they deserve

Uncovering your uniqueness

Spread the Word

Dr. Michael Gerharz