Back in 2017 I wrote about  six ways to be the best, I'd been a big fan of GL Hoffman*** creator of the blog 'What Would Dad Say?' GL had invited me to write a guest post in 2010 and can be credited for me discovering the joys of blogging. When I wrote 'Six Ways to Be the Best', I was working in a large, linear organisation that behaved on the outside like a people-centred organisation but didn't feel like one from the inside. As I revisit articles from long, long ago I've been inspired to look again, from the perspective of branding, which continues to be the main focus of many companies public-facing activity. Is it really all about the brand?

Don’t Build a Brand. Build a Community.

You might be able to guess the originators of the quotes… “If you want to milk the cow, give it good grass.”

It’s a simple idea, almost agricultural in its honesty, yet it captures the essence of sustainable business better than most strategy decks ever will. Value does not come from extraction; it comes from care. Whether your “cow” is a customer, a team, or a flagship product, the same rule applies: nurture first, benefit later.

This is why great organisations don’t obsess over branding alone — they obsess over belonging.

Walk in the Right Shoes

“Take off your management shoes and regularly walk in your customers’ shoes.”
“Take off your management shoes and regularly walk in your staff’s shoes.”

Leadership from a distance is convenient, but it’s also dangerous. Dashboards, reports, KPIs, and feedback summaries are useful — but they are representations, not reality.

Do you know what it feels like to be your own customer this month?

Make time to find out. Stand in line. Use the product. Navigate the systems. Work the tills. Spend a shift alongside your staff. You can employ the best consultants and secret shoppers in the world, but none of them will ever equal the insight gained from experiencing your organisation firsthand.

You are never too important to let your feet touch the ground.

Never Say Goodbye

“Never say goodbye, always ‘see you again.’” If you aren’t aiming for repeat business, you shouldn’t be in business at all.

Customers who don’t return are a warning sign — of complacency, lack of ambition, or a failing experience. Eventually, organisations that don’t prioritise return relationships become inward-looking. They fossilise. Dinosaur thinking takes hold.

Growth isn’t always about scale, volume, or footprint. Sometimes growth is simply deepening relationships — even (and especially) in large organisations. If you believe in your organisation, make it possible for people outside it to believe too.

That belief doesn’t come from slogans. It comes from consistency, care, and connection.

Don’t build a brand. Build a community. A strong brand can attract buyers. A strong community turns people into advocates who voluntarily recommend, defend, and improve what you offer.

Mind the Cash Cow

If you have a major seller — a product, service, or outlet that carries the business — ask yourself an uncomfortable question:

Are your senior leaders spending enough time with it? Valuing it. Nurturing it. Keeping it healthy. If not, why not? No excuses.

The heart of your business is your cash cow. Everything flows from its centre. If leadership assumes it’s “running itself,” manages it from a distance, or stops giving it one-to-one attention, the fall isn’t a possibility — it’s a certainty.

Be the River, Not the Rock

“Flow. Be the river, not the rock.”

Being a solid, reliable organisation — a “rock” — is admirable. But time passes. Markets shift. People change. Technology reshapes behaviour. Rocks don’t adapt; they erode.

Rivers endure because they move.

Design your organisation with flow. Build processes that reflect how people actually behave — desire routes, not rigid corridors. When obstacles appear, they become visible. When challenges arise, fluid organisations move around them instead of being blocked by them.

Stagnation kills communities. Movement sustains them.

Brands are built on messages. Communities are built on experiences.

If you want loyalty, don’t chase attention — earn trust.
If you want longevity, don’t manage from above — engage from within.
If you want growth, don’t harden — flow.

Don’t build a brand. Build a community, because a brand is a promise you make.

A community is a promise people make to each other.

The second one is far more powerful.

The original article can be found here: https://juliet.posthaven.com/from-the-archives-six-ways-to-be-the-best

***GL Hoffman, is the creator of  JobDig, a career search and employment guide. He then created and launched the incredibly successful LinkUp, an American job search engine that search’s jobs from almost 22,000 company websites! I don't believe he is related to LinkedIn's co-founder, but just like LinkedIn -  LinkUp is still going ....

©JulietB 2022

© JLB, Jan 2026

The Blister Pack Boys: Why Two Retirees Are Challenging an NHS Waste Blind Spot

In the space of just one year, Piers Nicholson and Anthony Warley have become known across South Wiltshire as the “Blister Pack Boys.”

Back in 2024, Piers (90) and Anthony (70) decided to do something about a problem most of us barely notice: the vast number of pharmaceutical blister packs that are not being properly recycled.

Blister packs are widely used as unit-dose packaging for tablets and capsules. They protect medication, extend shelf life, and offer some tamper resistance. Their introduction was originally supported by a Government Health Committee as a way of reducing the ease with which pills in bottles could be misused in attempts to end life.

But while blister packs serve an important purpose, they also present a serious environmental challenge.

Made from two different types of aluminium bonded together, blister packs cannot be placed in standard household recycling. Separating these materials is technically complex and costly. As a result, an estimated 1.5 million blister packs end up in landfill each year in the UK.

The fundamental issue is economic: the value of the recycled materials is far lower than the cost of recycling them.

There are currently only two specialist recycling companies able to process blister packs, both of which charge for providing and returning collection boxes. Some retailers have attempted to help. Superdrug has run an intermittent collection scheme, while Boots operates a points-based initiative with strict time limits, for their advantage card holders. Neither, however, works well for larger volumes or delivers a sustainable, long-term solution.

Anthony, a retired Respiratory Consultant and General Physician, and Piers, a retired sundial maker and founder of the Fleet Street Heritage Project, share a determination to tackle this conundrum. Their aim is to encourage NHS England and pharmaceutical companies to work towards a new, practical approach—one that addresses this untenable waste problem through innovation, collaboration, and awareness-raising.

In January 2025, supported by a small team of volunteers, Piers and Anthony purchased a recycling container from MYGroup and held their first public blister-pack collection event in Salisbury Market Place, with support from local artisan bakery Hendersons. One year on, and nearly 100,000 blister packs later diverted from landfill, they could feel justifiably proud. Instead, they simply say there is still work to be done.

If you know of any groups, organisations, or community networks that might be interested in hosting a short, informal talk on this subject, please let me know and I will happily pass on your details.

Originally posted on Medium, Jan 27, 2022

Come for a little amble with me?

© JulietB. Jan 27, 2022

Originally posted on Medium, January 04, 2022

This one’s for my fellow non-scientists.

As humans existing on a planet, we tend to simplify our environment, we use most commonly; Earth, Air, Water, Wind & Fire to quantify the elements. Sometimes we humanise it to the familiar; land and sea, or valleys and mountains, town and country. We use abstract, practical and geographic terms to describe and refer to what lies around us. Us busy, industrious humans like things to be relatable, graspable; to be able to touch, taste or see, to be able to visualise and re-create. Whilst we may differ on the approach, either relying more heavily on fact, or own-experience, or the work and research of others who specialise in studying ‘subjects beyond our ken’ (known experience), we return to the simple for reference.

Quantum mechanics arose as a superior theory, due to the fundamental failure of classical mechanics to describe several atomic phenomena. With the discovery of electron, by J.J. Thomson, in the year 1897, the whole idea of classical physics was shown to be inapplicable at the atomic level.

Quantum mechanics is like the new algebra. In the very act of comparing it to algebra am I dumbing down the complexity of Quantum Mechanics as I write? From a long, long, distance; a complete novice’s point of view, I find it fascinating that topics in physics that hitherto failed to adequately explain the irrational experiences such as objects seemingly moving without applied force, or the slowing down and speeding up of time, and of neutrons, atoms, sub-atomic particles (I mean WTF are sub-atomic particles!?), space, infinity and beyond… now form part of the solution to explain things previously considered indefinable and mystical.

Occasionally, a friend, a passing meme on Facebook, or a book title might entice me to conquer my ignorance and look a little closer. It was a brief and odd conversation in a café over Christmas that has led me here. It began with baking and moved to a piece of research based around couples having sex for thirty days straight and (mercifully) ranged swiftly on to politics, the de-stabilising of society and the role of the economy in this, before excited children bought the whole crazy exchange to a sudden stop, with imminent tears and a fight demanding all attention.

I’m at a stage in my life where I’m not clear on where I actually am, aside from the eternal question of what is my purpose? (my strengths, my core skills if you like), I have felt almost impelled, I may even mean forced by current socio-economic policy and its direct impact on my life to consider where I stand on many things and within the wider world. A sort of emotional and practical depth-finding exercise. Bouncing my position off the nearest solid objects and then finding an App to do the maths because I sure as hell can’t. And anyway, are objects actually solid? Quantum Mechanics tells me

“…the probability of your position at any given time, in the whole universe, is never zero”

Well that is quite exciting! In my current position I am less concerned with geography and more concerned with subjects such as work, ageing, cancer, death, healthcare, money, stability…. Tangible and intangible issues that draw me into a narrower field of vision and certainly don’t seem in any way related to Quantum Mechanics. However, I consult the bluffers guide to QM and I find words such as “Radiation’ or ‘Ionising Radiation’ to be more precise.

“Particles that can actually tunnel through walls, appear out of thin air and disappear, stay entangled and choose to behave like waves”

This is how we blast cancer cells out of the body, right? This is akin to the principle of wi-fi (Wireless Fidelity — would you credit it, it’s a brand name), where your printer magically reacts to commands from your lap-top isn’t it? A protocol that allows the exchange of data via radio waves? Well, radio waves contain noise that emerges from the random motion of the atoms in the things they are emitted from. One way to reduce this noise is to cool down the radio waves.

‘Using a circuit analogous laser cooling technique, scientists at the Delft University of Technology have discovered a new way to cool radio waves to their quantum ground state. They developed a device using a technique called photon pressure coupling that could also be used to detect ultra-weak magnetic resonance (MRI) signals or for quantum-sensing applications that can help the search for dark matter’

And there we have it, (nothing you can’t hum there) but proof, perhaps, that our healthcare is intrinsically connected to Quantum Mechanics. But, “Whoah!” I hear you cry, “Wait a minute! Dark Matter!!!?” I know, it’s mind-blowing. I want to say that it’s not related to the Dark Web and is something else entirely but at this point I am simply not qualified to make that claim. Anyway moving back to place and position… we are taken via electrons and photons (but not quite as we knew them in the genre of retro science fiction) to Black Body Radiation and the magnificently named Max Planck, who says that E = hν. Where E is energy, h is the Planck’s constant and ν is the frequency of radiation and where Albert Einsteins concept of light as a stream of photons assuming a wave pattern, is given a duality of character by Planck and becomes both wave and particle.

It’s all pretty clear so far isn’t it? And (stay with me), once we get into the QM theory in regards to energy (Oh, there’s those sub-atomic particles again) some really interesting thoughts start to burgeon. I’m skipping Schrodinger, his cat and electro-magnetism and ‘Matter Waves’ and getting back to ‘position’ thanks to Werner Heisenberg who proposes that ‘the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa’. Δx.Δp ≥ h/2π (where Δx is the uncertainty in position, Δp is the uncertainty in momentum and h is Planck’s constant).

Before you slope off for a coffee, or are rushed off to A&E with lockjaw after yawning too much, just remember this is all theory and if it takes you anywhere (and whatever the naysayer’s say, the internet is an abundant source of expert guidance providing you check for the article, or pages’ provenance first, and it will definitely make more sense than I do). As I was saying, if it takes you anywhere, it might give you pause to think a little about ‘position’ because if probability says you are unlikely to be at zero and unlikely to return to zero — wherever you are right now you are never right back at the beginning. With every breath, step, action or thought, you are moving, constantly changing position. With every book you read and journey you make, you are riding the wave of Quantum Mechanics in one form or another. I like the concept of life as a wave in motion made up of particles creating, absorbing, emitting or containing energy. So maybe I should worry less about where I am and more about simply enjoying the ride. Interestingly prominent 19C Irish physicist John Tyndall wrote

“Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles.”