Thoughts & Insights

How COVID-19 will change everything

How COVID-19 will change everything

COVID-19 is turning the world upside-down. Some of the recently furloughed are launching new initiatives, others are hiding under the duvet (both responses are perfectly valid). Some people have arranged their stockpile in alphabetical order, and some have realised...

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Top tips for presenting online events

Top tips for presenting online events

As coronavirus forces event cancellations, organisers are turning to online meetings, webinars and webcasts to fill some of the gaps. The coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has closed businesses and borders around the world. As people are encouraged to self-isolate, many...

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Droning Home for Christmas

Droning Home for Christmas

Gatwick Airport - The hero of the hour? - I can’t decide if it’s more like Wall-E or Johnny 5. If your family is driving you crazy at Christmas, spare a thought for those whose travel plans have been disrupted by the drone incident at Gatwick Airport. Here are the...

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How to…Speak to a parliamentary select committee

How to…Speak to a parliamentary select committee

Though some of us will have seen the bawdy Prime Minister’s Questions every Wednesday at 12 noon, a lot of parliament’s work is done in select committees. A select committee is made up of a number of members of parliament, and deals with particular issues relating to...

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Trusted Savings Bank?

Trusted Savings Bank?

Imagine opening the banking app on your phone and looking at the balance. It seems surprisingly high. You look more closely, and don’t recognise the recent transactions. Then you see the name: it is not your account. When you’re sorting out whether you feel the thrill...

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The Business Book Awards 2018

The Business Book Awards 2018

At last week’s inaugural Business Book Awards ceremony in Central London, Lucy McCarraher said in her welcoming speech that she had set up the awards in partnership with Thinkfest, in response to changes in the business book market: ‘Business books themselves have...

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Kentucky Fried Crisis

Kentucky Fried Crisis

We have three golden principles when it comes to communication: authority, authenticity and audience. Usually, we apply them to speaking in public and giving presentations - but they work well across other communications as well. Forget about where you put your feet...

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How to write books and influence people

How to write books and influence people

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even packs of chimpanzees do it. And we do it - sometimes. Sharing knowledge is what holds a community together, whether that’s warning of predators, advertising food sources or playing a game. When humans share knowledge, we codify and...

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‘What AI means for leaders’

Automation has already touched every industry on the planet: whether it's sorting the rotten apples out of a harvest or customers scanning their own shopping at a supermarket checkout, machines are deeply entwined in our lives, whether we notice them or not. It's...

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Speak Like a Leader – PS Programmes’ IoD Masterclass

Speak Like a Leader – PS Programmes’ IoD Masterclass

The PS Programmes team recently delivered a masterclass titled ‘Speak Like a Leader’ for members of the Institute of Directors, at the IoD’s Pall Mall address in London. As it’s always a good way to engage an audience, and find out what it is that they expect from a...

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BA: a high-vis fracas

BA: a high-vis fracas

It’s long been the habit of this blog to seize upon a big news story and dissect the PR surrounding it: Deepwater Horizon, Alton Towers, Samsung, Hotpoint, you name it, we’ve chucked in our two cents. And the latest showstopper – British Airways falling foul of a...

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The butterfly effect: United Airlines in a flap

The butterfly effect: United Airlines in a flap

It's sometimes a challenge to work out the level at which we pitch our advice. Some clients are experienced media performers who want to step up a level. Others really need the basic building blocks to help them understand the fundamentals of communications. I wonder,...

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Fake news! Beware the wisdom of crowds

Fake news! Beware the wisdom of crowds

If you ask a thousand people to guess the weight of an Easter egg, the average mean guess will be very close to correct. But answers to some questions aren't so easy to fact check, and sometimes we only get the answers we want to hear. If you Google 'NASA moon...

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Discover Nadine Dereza’s Desert Island Disc choices

Discover Nadine Dereza’s Desert Island Disc choices

We’re huge fans of Desert Island Discs at PS Programmes and, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the iconic show in 2017, I have been casting away a different member of my team each week to the far-flung shores of the BBC’s mythical desert island, never to be seen...

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