The two most important things we can do are to allow ourselves to be seen AND to really see others. The greatest gift you can give a person is to see who she is and to reflect that back to her. When we help people to be who they want to be, to take back some of the permission they deny themselves, we are doing our best, most meaningful work.

We are prepared to trade privacy for significance. But we still want to choose the things we pay attention to and the stories we believe.

Marketing has gone from this… It turns out that affinity that is earned, not attention that is bought and paid for, is what’s powering business growth now.

Increasingly we buy from companies that reflect the stories we believe about who we are, brands that support the narrative of our lives and values.

But IKEA’s extensive research can influence product development only so much. Because IKEA’s business model depends on volume, they can’t change their products for different markets. It’s essential, therefore, that the in-store room displays fit each country’s culture. A bedroom in Japan might feature tatami mats and the earthquake beams that go th

The solution lies in following a principle that management consultant Peter Drucker spoke about decades ago: ‘the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer’. Drucker goes as far as to say that the customer is the ‘starting point’ of a business’s purpose.

What companies and entrepreneurs sometimes forget is that the purpose of innovation is not simply to make new, improved products and services; it is to make things that are meaningful to the people who use them.

As I worked with clients, I kept hitting on this same problem over and over again. They were working hard to bring ideas to market and enlisting my help with the storytelling part after the idea was fully formed; their first focus was almost completely on the idea itself when it should have been on the prospective user or customer. In fact, it woul

Because car ownership is not common in China, IKEA stores are built in city centres. ‘And in a region where “do-it-yourself” furniture concepts were practically unheard of prior to IKEA, the company offers far more delivery and assembly options than it does anywhere else in the world.’