simple not easy

Having just spent a couple of hours with students at City of Birmingham Uni I was struck by a couple of things. Firstly how open and how free from agenda they are – they’re not looking to prove their point, protect their position or otherwise have a vested interest in maintaining fixed beliefs.

Don’t misunderstand me – this certainly doesn’t mean they’re lacking in opinions or thoughts of their own – their challenges and questions demonstrated they have this in abundance – what it means is they’re genuine free-thinkers.

Corporate leaders overlook and ignore these guys at their peril.

I couldn’t help wondering how many of them are currently employed, albeit part-time, by brands that could genuinely benefit from engaging with them, asking for their perspective and finally taking on board their ideas?

My guess is very few, if any, of their managers have the courage or the wisdom to do this simply because they see them as part-time students rather than a source of valuable and deeply relevant perspectives.

Secondly, many of the comments made were how simple the Romancing message is, that it’s really, well, pretty obvious stuff and what is it with corporate brands that simply don’t get this?

I honestly believe that it is because it’s so simple and jam-packed full of common sense it gets missed. That it’s not complicated to implement or because it’s so obvious, somehow devalues its currency?

Sometimes when we live close to something we become so familiar with it we tend to stop paying it the attention it deserves. It’s almost as if this familiarity renders our instinctive knowledge to the ‘irrelevance file’.

Couple this with the fact that obvious and common sense things are often incredibly simple ….. but they’re not easy. Not easy to adopt. Not easy to implement. Not easy to recognise.

For if it were easy then we’d all be doing it wouldn’t we?