Had a very interesting conversation today which got me thinking. I was talking to a planner in the States and was trying to describe a certain company to him. I tried words like "progressive" versus "staid", I tried "bigger on the outside" versus "small on the inside". I even tried "more like Unilever and Procter than Nike" and I still don't think it connected. And then we started talking about what sort of people it was that worked there and he said "they sound quite Middle America" and I realised that actually that was precisely what I needed as a short cut. Forget descriptive words, forget analogies, just compare things to types of people that other people know and you're away.
