Category Archives: Management

The origins of cat herding, from television ads through Warren Bennis to Poul Anderson

By Paul Syrysko | Published: October 15, 2010

The phrase herding cats comes from a tv ad for an IT company and if few people know that, even fewer know that the term was lifted from a rather obscure management self-help book. Herding cats is now a ubiquitous phrase that has come into management-speak to describe tasks that are tricky because things are [...]

Posted in Management | Tagged ads, EDS, herding cats, leadership, Management, Poul Anderson, sci-fi, super bowl, Tom Peters, Warren Bennis | 5 Comments

Welcome to Propheris Limited

We are communications technology and marketing experts focused on the health sector.

Our deep knowledge of digital and traditional channels enables us to craft your interfaces, information and messages efficiently and effectively, whether for use within your organisation or out to your customers and external stakeholders.

We engage people with video, with websites and with database interfaces. And wherever appropriate, we link them all together to make the sum work more effectively than the parts.

Recent Articles

Patient Experience videos on our new YouTube channel
We’ve uploaded the first of a series of patient experience videos to our YouTube channel. We wanted to create a cohesive… »

How to photograph a plastic bag in 9 steps
Taking a picture of a plastic bag may seem the most inane marketing task but it brings myriad complexities. Faced with an… »

Generating pdf newsletters automatically from WordPress: how to include a few pages and resolve memory limit errors
We’re using WordPress as a CMS for a client who was thinking of producing a newsletter, both for those without access and… »

Debugging web scripts with the Firefox REST Client
Because Web Scripts involve two computers talking to each other, they are potentially hard to debug. We’ve found that… »

Analysing web content semantics with AlchemyAPI: Part One – The Semantic Web
How do you methodically analyse the context of hundreds of web pages? It’s an issue of semantics. Tasked with looking at… »

Using Ruby on Rails with Alfresco
A large part of our Documas application concerns ordinary Create/Read/Update/Delete (CRUD) operations on a MySQL… »

Employing Alfresco web scripts to answer RESTful calls
REST is a set of ideas that promise to simplify communication between applications. If you have not come across REST before,… »

Opening up Alfresco to other web applications
We’ve built a web application, Documas, on the solid foundation of the Alfresco Document Management system. In this… »

PDF manipulation and editing via the command line with pdftk
We recently had a small job to chop and reassemble a dozen or so pdfs and then include them into a website archive. Our client… »

Google font API makes embedded web fonts easy, were it not for a bug
We’ve just been updating the design of one of our client’s sites and, as ever, fonts are a focus. Earlier this… »

A Five Step Process to Create a Successful Clinical Trials Marketing Strategy
Any communication effort needs to follow a strategy. And, like any strategy, performance needs to be measurable. Clinical… »

What’s in a Name? The meaning of Propheris
I spent an awful lot of time searching for an appropriate name for this business. Possibly too long. But it’s so… »
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