Be honest: which resource is more precious to you: your budget? or your time?

I thought so.

Second question: Which resource do you focus on spending more effectively: your budget? or your time?

I thought so . Different answer to the first question, right?

One more question! Who do you spend more time with: your colleagues? or your customers? Yep. Most of us do!

So here’s the offer. Let’s spend 48 hours with your customers. Sure, bring all your senior management colleagues and any other key stakeholders. .yes that can include non-execs and even your Chairman.

You’ll achieve more in a two day co-creative forum, than a month of Sundays writing and delivering and listening to power point presentations at meetings with your management colleagues ( That’s what’s taking your time, right?)

Believe me it works. (Or if you don’t believe me ask my clients or their customers.) You’ll save time. Your customers will be happy you listened to them -and you’ll reach a new level of trust and understanding.

My guess is you’ll be pleased you spent time on what was important, rather than what was urgent. You may even find you didn’t need to write or listen to that power point presentation after all.

Since The TV era, marketing has been defined by communications not content.

About polishing the stone rather than sharpening it. Or about questioning if it should be a stone.

Take Heathrow 5 - where the focus on the new ( cancelled) campaign proved to be an inadequate deliverable for marketing management.

You know the joke of the ad man who sitting on the edge of the bed telling how great it’s going to be.

We need to focus on actions not words. Or rather interactions. That’s where value is created. Marketers tend to call them ‘touch points’ . This is a feeble term. They should be considered ‘value points’

We need to create the experience, not talk about how great it’s going to be. Or as my colleague Francis Gouillart would say: Co-create the experience.

‘360′ is ‘180′ the wrong answer. It’s implies a technique-driven perspective: integrating from us to the customer.

We need to come at it other way round! Put the customer inside - then take a 360 with the organisation. Rather like my friend Miha Pogacnik who puts the audience inside his Slovenian Symphony Orchestra !

The future is about aligning resources and skills around companies’ interactions.

A marketer’s job is to create an experience - part tangible part intangible. To ‘Co-create’. With ‘prosumers’ rather than consumers.

The traditional client agency structure is wrong in so many ways. What is needed is for marketers to initiate a conversation between their colleagues, their agencies and their customers in real time and in real space.

Yes, on the web is a good start, but there’s nothing like a physical real time conversation where you can see the whites of your customers eyes, hear what they don’t say as well as what they do, and take live decisions with all key stakeholders present.

Don’t start with techniques; as innovative marketers are doing , start with experiences.

And the final thought: marketing is too important to be left to marketers. Because a good marketer needs all parts of the organisation aligned behind delivering their story. Unless of course you just want to be a storyteller.

Heard Stephen Pinker at the RSA speak on his new book ‘The Stuff of Thought’

The part on swearing - the five ways to cuss - is worth the price of entry alone as he describes language as a window in human nature’ If you want to know the five ways or tell your euphemisms from dysphemisms, look it up!

But how much of challenges in collaboration come down to language and culture. One of my French clients was cursing - well at least bemoaning - why the Brits don’t say what they mean . And frequently say what they don’t mean.

‘Gerard’ described how we use ‘maybe’ when we don’t mean maybe at all. (As when I was cussing once to my boss he said ‘maybe you should get another job’.)

He asked if in our next European workshop I could get the Brits to say what they mean. Easier said than done’ Gerard.. Even if the word facilitate is based on the French Facile’; making things simpler. I’m not sure that it will be that simple. Many of us use words to avoid saying what we think.

As de Gaulle noted the French may have 250 kinds of cheese. But we Brits even though not renowned as great lovers, or perhaps because of it, have 800 expressions for copulation.

But I’ll give it a go, mon brave. Next week I’ll pick on and ‘out’ any hapless Brit who obfuscates in one of my sessions.

Do you harness energy? Or do you burn energy on planning, processes and programs?

I’m in Chicago; city of the Blues. Even in early June it’s chilly and windy like the economy.

Yet we recognise the wind increasingly as a source of energy. Indeed if you’ve got no wind, you’ve got no wind to blow away your blues - or negative energy.

A recent Survey of 100 top entrepreneurs concluded that nearly half thought the changes in the economy would be good for their business. And Michael O’Leary of Ryanair ‘welcomes’ the high price of oil saying it will blow away the weaker airlines.

LBS’s Professor Lynda Gratton’s recent book highlights the importance to organisations of Energy Hot Spots as she calls them.

Because as the slogan on my coffee cup reminds me “if nothing ever changes, nothing ever changes”.

Without momentum or energy we can achieve nothing .

A mill pond may be beautiful. But try facilitating a group with no heat, light or wind in their sails.

Energy coming from the wrong direction is much better than none at all. You can still sail into the wind by tacking. But you can’t sail anywhere without wind in your sails.

Maybe that’s why so many people in business burn out in their ‘midlife’. While others discover new sources of sustainable energy.