Thoughts & Insights

Take a walk through the shuttered restaurants and shops of Britain, and you will feel that you are being ignored by old friends. Whether it’s a café you used to regularly meet people in, or a clothes shop that always seemed to have the right outfit for every occasion...

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...

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...

Donald Trump has made many of us in the communications business shift uncomfortably in our seats in the last couple of years. When Trump became President, he pretty much took the standard advice of the speaker coach, screwed it up, and threw it back in our faces: be...

Recently, the world lost Kofi Annan, the former United Nations Secretary-General. I along with many others was saddened to hear the news of Kofi Annan’s death and felt extremely lucky to have met the great man - the ultimate diplomat. I interviewed him on a couple of...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Women are ‘in’ which comes as a shock to those of us who never realised we were ‘out’. ‘Feminism’ is the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s Word of 2017. And the women who have broken their silence over sexual harassment are Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’. From the...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...