Selling the truth

Sheppard Moscow is a consultancy full of frighteningly intelligent people with profound ideas about the way people work together. I've been their sole copywriter for about three years now, since designer Marita Lashko and I created their corporate identity.

Recently, they've been looking at the area of "360-degree Feedback", and asking some tough questions (as is their wont). Such as: if you have to fill in a form appraising your boss, how honest are you really going to be? And how can you "capture" the true complexity of human behaviour with tick-boxes?

You can't, of course. Sheppard Moscow's research has shown that traditional appraisals are pretty much a waste of time (my words, not theirs). Rarely do such programmes create the improvements in performance they're designed to achieve.

Their solution is pretty radical. They've got rid of all the forms and questionnaires. Instead, they allow people to get together and discuss their performance face-to-face - with total candour. Amazingly, it works: one client said he learnt more in two hours than he had in the previous five years.

The problem was what to call this rather intangible new "product". It needed a name that communicated something of its radical nature and emotive power. So they turned to their writer. And that's my solution above: "The Well". (The "e.g." is part of the wider Sheppard Moscow identity.)

It's a simple name bursting with useful resonances: a gathering place; a source of renewal; a way to tap into deeper resources. And it's just been launched with a booklet Marita and I created, setting out the fundamentals of The Well. The response has already been very positive: it seems the truth is an idea that might just catch on.