Leadership Lessons from… The Engaging Brand

October 21st, 2008

Anna Farmery maintains a great blog entitled The Engaging Brand.

The Engaging Brand supports companies and individuals who want to create engagement with their brand. Anna is popular speaker throughout England on areas such as social media, personal and employer branding, and leadership. She lives and breathes Web 2.0. Her blog is ranked in the Top 100 in AdAge and has been recognized as a “must read” leadership blog. The Engaging Brand podcast was nominated for the Best Business Podcast at the Podcast Awards in both 2007 and 2008.

I was honored to be her guest on the latest installment of The Engaging Brand podcast to discuss my book, Toy Box Leadership: Leadership Lessons From The Toys You Loved As A Child. In this podcast interview we talk about:

• What LEGO bricks can teach us about the importance of relationships and business connections.
• How strong marketing is linked to strong connections
• How different people connect for different reasons
• How the power lies in what the connection can build rather than the connection itself.
• We learn leadership lessons from the Slinky Dog!
• How to keep the team with you on your leadership journey
• How personal development is so important for your creativity.
• The Yo-Yo’s tips on the creativity process and how to take ideas to workable business solutions
• The different emotions and how we need to understand our emotional makeup
• The importance of doing the right thing for our brand
• How being involved with the team helps us lead the team forward

You can listen to it here, here or you can subscribe to the show via iTunes.

Anna also extracted nine business quotes from Toy Box Leadership that she felt were especially inspiring and reminded her of the importance of continuing to develop as a leader. This is rewarding - knowing how hard my co-author, Ron Hunter and I worked on finding new and inspiring quotes. Here are the nine that Anna pulled out:

1. Erich Fromm “Creativity requires the courage to let go of certainties”
2. Charles Douglas Jackson “Great ideas need landing gear, as well as wings”
3. Admiral Hyman Rickover “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people”
4. General George Patton “I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom”
5. Ray Kroc on the importance of learning “As long as you are green you are growing, As soon as you are ripe, you start to rot”
6. Charles Reade “Example is contagious behavior”
7. Ralph Waldo Emerson “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail”
8. Edmund Burke “Those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it”
9. Nelson Mandela “The greatest glory in living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”

Thanks Anna - Your work really is engaging.

Michael E. Waddell is the co-author of Toy Box Leadership: Leadership Lessons From The Toys You Loved As A Child.

Entry Filed under: other blogs, toy box leadership