10 business lessons we learned from Winston Churchill [2/2]

Last Tuesday we already shared part one of this twofold blog series. Get ready for 5 more business lessons from Winston Churchill which have inspired and still inspire us to take our business forward. Five quotes illustrated with failures, successes and challenges we’ve experienced over the past years that helped us grow InSites Consulting into what it is now.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.

From a size perspective, we are still relatively small compared to many of the incumbents in the industry. But from an image perspective, we are proud to be recognized among the top of the world, being one of the most awarded agencies out there. Only recently, we confirmed our position in the GRIT top 10 list of most innovative agencies in the world, moving up from 10th position last year to 8th this year. By conducting ‘research on research’ in our ForwaR&D Lab, writing books on the future of marketing and spreading our knowledge with anyone in our industry, we managed to strongly embed our brand into the industry mindset.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Recognizing success, celebrating it and giving back are essential conditions for success. We give back via our profit-sharing practice, ensuring that everyone in our company benefits from our collective success. Our partnership model allows our best people to turn into shareholders. Our HR department is not called ‘human resources’, but rather ‘employee happiness’, taking an employee-centric perspective and focusing on driving our people’s everyday happiness. Every year, we celebrate the Employee Appreciation Day in all our offices as a token of appreciation towards every colleague, for giving the best of themselves every single day.

These are not dark days: these are great days – the greatest days our country has ever lived.

While the economic climate could have been better and brand owners budgets are under immense pressure, we try to find the opportunity within the threat. In times when our clients need to accomplish more with less, we help them drive efficiency and agility of business decision making. We support them in turning consumer centricity and collaboration into a core strategic competence through our Consumer Consulting Board approach, allowing them to tap into a diverse set of needs and objectives as a result of it.

To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.

While we have a set of ‘rules’ through which we grow our business, these are not carved in stone for eternity. Just like a snake sheds its skin to allow for growth as well as to remove parasites along with the old skin, we need to continuously reinvent ourselves in order to survive and remain successful. We created an environment that pushes us to change every day: by exclusively focusing on digital methods we oblige ourselves to catch up with the latest trends and digital technologies; by choosing to be a growth company we need to adjust to an ever-increasing internal size and complexity; by starting up offices in different countries we are engaged to listen and adapt to local cultures.

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

On a final note, we have gradually become bolder at formulating our ambitions. Formulating a BHAG or ‘Big Hairy Audacious Goal’ clarifies the strategic intent of your company internally as well as externally and raises the overall ambition level for everyone. By changing our frame of reference from ourselves or our direct competitors to the whole industry, we commit to making a dent in the universe. Think big, act radical: our BHAGs are to ‘make the market research industry sexier’ and to ‘transform market research into consumer collaboration’.

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