Company gifts
and occasions.

Corporate gifting fails for one structural reason: it is given to a company. Companies do not have feelings about gifts, and a hamper addressed to an organisation becomes a hamper for the office kitchen within a day. The single highest-leverage change available is to give something to a named individual because of something they said in a meeting.

The second is to get out of December. A gift arriving in the most crowded fortnight of the year competes with everybody else's and is remembered by nobody in January. The same gift in February, or on the anniversary of the account starting, lands in an empty field.

Internally, the equivalent insight is that recognition delivered by a scheme is recognition from a process, and a process cannot notice anything. Specificity and timing do almost all the work: naming exactly what somebody did, close to when they did it, in front of people whose opinion they actually value. The object attached matters far less than any of the three.

Two practical constraints worth knowing before you plan anything. Many organisations have a gifts policy with a value threshold, and a present that has to be declined is worse than none, so asking is a professional question rather than an awkward one. And any commission involving photographs of staff needs individual agreement with a route to declining that requires no explanation, because somebody may have a reason they do not want to discuss.

Where to start