Mar 11, 2026 | Collaboration
You just came out of a meeting. Five executives, forty-five minutes consumed, in total three and three quarters hours of management time.
Calculate the direct cost, and consider the opportunity cost of that meeting and ask yourself:
What decision did we make?
Who is accountable for resulting action?
Too often meetings become social and political timewasters, a huge millstone on productivity that enables posturing, offers an echo-chamber for the noisy ones, and wastes time and money.
There is plenty of great information about how to run meetings on the web.
Have minutes of the previous, have an agenda, nominated begin and finish times, ensuring everyone has the chance to speak up, and so on.
The following is none of that.
Most meetings are, or should be, for the making a decision, ensuring alignment, and allocation of accountability. Some have a legitimate purpose of creating community, generating, and clarifying a common objective, but they can be subjected to the same following three step process I have found to be a useful tool.
- Articulate the decision, or purpose, the meeting has been called to make.
- Examine the pros and cons of the decision, with particular reference to examining the worst case if the choice made is wrong, and the steps that eventuality might necessitate.
- Ensure that everyone in the meeting knows who ‘owns’ the decision, and is accountable for implementation, feedback, and recommending and deploying any necessary adjustments.
Meeting for the sake of meeting may be the greatest productivity killer I have ever seen.
Header credit: Tom Gauld in New Scientist magazine.
Mar 2, 2026 | Governance, retail
As a kid Mum used to make a Christmas pudding and claim that the fairies had magically stuck in a bunch of threepences and sixpences into it. (yes, I am that old)
The possibility of finding a couple of weeks pocket money in the pudding created intense sibling rivalry around who could sneak the biggest piece, and thus have a greater chance of finding some magic.
Coles and Woolies in their most recent results announced in the last fortnight have delivered the Australian community a magic pudding.
Times are tough, there is a cost of living crisis happening around us, yet their recently released year end results hide magic for shareholders. (to be fair, most of us are now shareholders via superannuation)
The domination of these two chains is fuelling inflation.
This is a perspective not covered in any of the commentary I have seen so far.
The logic is as follows:
Margin expansion.
Coles and Woolworths have been able to preserve, and in Coles’ case expand, healthy margins over the past year. Together, they control roughly 60–65% of the supermarket sector, with Aldi and various independents supplied by wholesalers (usually Metcash) making up most of the rest. This means that for most packaged food and grocery suppliers, the path to survival runs through the trading terms imposed by just two buyers.
The latest financials show that Coles has widened its supermarket margins from 26.6 % to 27.4% and its EBIT margin edged up from 5.0% to 5.3%. Woolworths’ Australian Food division reported a gross margin of 28.6% and EBIT margin 5.4% in FY25, only slightly down from the previous year after a period of “price investment”. In other words, the duopoly has not absorbed the inflation shock through lower profits; it has kept margins high and, in Coles’ case, increased them.
The cost of living crisis has not dampened the margins of Colesworth during the tough times.
Retail real estate.
Coles and Woolies dominate shelf space and therefore set the ‘reference prices’ that other retailers follow. As a result they influence price inflation far beyond their own stores.
Woolworths and Coles use their buyer power to squeeze suppliers via terms demands, rebates, expensive promotional deals, and all the other tricks they have in their magic pudding. The power suppliers are able to exert in these pricing negotiations is extremely limited. This applies even for major key suppliers in major categories for whom supermarket volumes are essential to covering operating overheads. Colesworth are then able to set shelf prices with no reference to any competitor beyond the other gorilla. Suppliers must accept lower margins and/or push up prices in other channels just to survive.
Smaller independents, convenience outlets, foodservice and export customers then face higher input costs, which in turn pushes their retail prices closer to and usually way above the duopoly’s. They rely on ‘convenience’ and stores in population centres below the cut-off for the gorillas to invest in outlets.
The more the big two protect or expand their margins under the cover of “inflation”, the more this cost‑shifting machine drives price rises right across the grocery market.
‘Colesworth’ market share sets prices and terms across two thirds of Australia’s FMCG market.
Scale delivers price immunity to Colesworth
Oligopoly economics.
This is an oligopoly at work. They are taking advantage of a general inflationary environment to widen or protect margins, and establishing a sticky price level that will persist when inflationary pressures ease. That will be a nice windfall!
In a genuinely competitive market, we would expect that at least some of the pain of higher energy, labour and logistics costs shows up in thinner supermarket margins.
In Australia’s hyper‑concentrated grocery sector, the evidence points the other way. Without Aldi as an anchor, we would be in real trouble at the checkout.
Increasing costs are not impacting on Colesworth margins. Their scale enables them to push EBIT above 5% by pushing price up faster than the cost increases.
Medicine unavailable.
Unfortunately, I see no short-term measures that will reverse the concentration it has taken the 45 years I have been observing, to evolve. Politicians can have all the enquiries, reports, and ‘band-aid’ measures they can dream up, but none will get at the core problem other than breaking up the oligopoly. Forced divestiture.
I have written elsewhere that this is a really stupid idea. A legislated breakup would only increase costs significantly in the supply chain that would be felt at the checkout. It is therefore only a brainfart of those who will never see government, but which persists as a policy option.
The horse has not just bolted, it is over the hill. It will take another 20 years for changes in the retail environment to deliver a more genuinely competitive sector.
Header: My thanks to Scott Adams. The single Dilbert panel says it all.
Feb 26, 2026 | Branding, Customers
The supermarket shelf has become a monument to creative timidity. Blame the retailers if you like, they certainly deserve some of it. As public corporations laser-focused on financial returns, they prize predictability and incremental volume over anything that might actually take a risk and possibly surprise a consumer.
Their overheads are enormous, their tolerance for risk minimal, and their enthusiasm for the genuinely new essentially theoretical. But suppliers and their so-called marketers have been equally complicit, and strategically gutless, offering up range extensions dressed as innovation and apparently hoping nobody notices.
They haven’t.
The result is aisle after aisle of house brands and proprietary products that are distinguished from each other by the typeface on the label, the colour, or pack size.
I’ve been around long enough to have watched this pattern repeat itself with depressing regularity. And the lesson that emerges, without an exception I have seen, is that the products which truly succeed don’t just occupy a shelf position.
They create a category that didn’t previously exist.
Not a new flavour. Not a reformulation. A new reason for a consumer to reach for their wallet in a way they never had before.
Finding that gap has always felt harder than it actually is. It felt that way fifty years ago when I created my first genuinely new product: a mix of broken olive pieces and pimento in a lightly spiced brine, launched under the Oliveholme brand into a market that barely knew what an olive was. The gap was real, the timing was right, and the product acted as a catalyst for the explosion of ‘continental’ products that followed.
Steve Jobs noted that you can always identify the pioneers by the arrows in their backs. He was right. What he might also have noted is that for every pioneer who took the arrows, three more held back in the tree line and watched someone else make the same journey first, and make a fortune doing it.
The muesli bar story is the one that still stings.
Working at Cerebos forty years ago, we had Cerola muesli and a clear gap in the market: there was no convenient, portable breakfast option. We developed the concept of what we now know as the muesli bar, ran the formulation work, did the factory trials, and built the financial model. I pushed the sales forecast as hard as I felt I responsibly could. As it turned out, it wasn’t hard enough, and the project was shelved. Twelve months later, Uncle Toby’s launched their muesli bar and sold in the first month what I had projected for an entire year. A category was born, and Cerebos was watching from the sideline.
The Light and Crunchy story is a different kind of cautionary tale. We test marketed a cereal product in South Australia designed to fill the then gap between muesli and the two dominating products, Corn Flakes and Wheat Bix. The initial results were very strong, and we congratulated ourselves thoroughly, while planning a national rollout. Then Kellogg’s appeared over the hill with ‘Just Right’, backed by promotional firepower designed to make clear this was their patch and trespassers would be dealt with. Light and Crunchy died on the test bed. Just Right remains on the market, a small but valuable Kelloggs sub-brand. At least I got the strategy right, while dramatically underestimating the competitive response.
Then there was the pasta sauce. Cerebos had the Fountain brand, then dominant in tomato and flavoured sauces. Australians were eating increasing but still small amounts of pasta and making their own sauce. It was a category gap so obvious it almost announced itself. We test marketed in Victoria, managed to fumble the distribution timing and the support package, and watched the whole thing unravel for reasons entirely unrelated to the product itself. A year later, Masterfoods launched Alora — later renamed Dolmio, and created a category worth tens of millions.
The pattern in all three stories is the same, and it isn’t subtle.
Category creation is where the real money lives. Not in the incremental, not in the safe, and certainly not in the fourth variant of an existing product line.
Seeing the future is no easier today than it was fifty years ago. If anything, it’s marginally harder with more people are looking at the same trends, applying the same tools, drawing similar conclusions. But the fundamentals haven’t changed.
You need foresight, yes, but you also need the courage to act on it with aggression and conviction rather than retreating into caution the moment a spreadsheet looks uncertain. Deep pockets help. A tolerance for failure is non-negotiable. Most ideas will founder somewhere along the path — before launch or after — for reasons that range from the predictable to the profoundly unfair.
But the search must continue. Stop looking, and the retailer’s private label will eventually occupy almost all the shelf space, and the shelves will evolve into a grey monotone of sameness.
Consumer boredom is patient and unnoticed, but waiting to be tapped. The retailer’s distribution chokehold drives their margin calculations. They are not patient, are continuingly demanding and risk averse, except when it is not them taking the risk.
Header: via nano banana
Feb 23, 2026 | Governance, Strategy
The political energy wars in Australia will flare again with the ascendancy of the right of the Liberal party, surging of One Nation, and relative gutlessness of the government.
The ‘debate’ will be about residential energy costs.
It is too easy for faux ‘Current affairs’ programs and politicians to find someone with 3 small kids not able to pay the electricity bill. That story gets splashed around as the core of the ‘national conversation’.
What is rarely given any oxygen is the impact of energy costs on industry. From the local coffee shop, bakery, and warehouse to energy intensive industries like smelting commodity ores, and cement.
When energy becomes too expensive, unstable or unreliable, businesses close, or relocate, and lift prices.
The principals of these businesses rarely get heard, unless they are a really major business like an aluminium smelter. As a result, the ‘debate’ will be about the wrong thing.
We should be talking about ‘energy sovereignty’.
Throw away the slogans, and work towards making energy one of the inputs to our way of life that we actually control. Why be a price taker at the whim of others, and a flailing and ineffective domestic policy vacuum.
Renewables are now cheaper than fossil fuel generated power, but the fight remains about the environment and retail prices, not cost and sovereignty.
Cheap power is rapidly becoming the strategic necessity of the 21st century. It shapes both national and geopolitical outcomes. Those who control power generation will end up controlling the economy. Foundational to control of power generation is the control of the essential elements in the power supply chain: lithium, graphite and other science fiction sounding minerals.
China is not only generating the cheapest power, but they also control the supply of these minerals from the extracted commodity to the final input to manufactured products.
Our focus on the retail price of energy is way too narrow.
We should be focussed on the strategic importance of the whole supply chain, and where in that chain strategic power can be exercised.
Currently Australia has none, but we have the potential to be a major global player.
That means bi partisan agreement on significant long-term investment with a long-term ROI measured by the standard of living of our grandchildren.
Is there any chance of all of that happening?
Header courtesy Tom Gauld at New Scientist.
Feb 16, 2026 | Change, Customers, Innovation
Customer centricity is a con. Average marketers chant it when they’ve run out of creativity, or bow to the accountants and lawyers who run the place.
Customers don’t hand you the truth. They hand you clues without knowing they are doing it.
They tell you what they can describe, which reflects the status quo. They cannot tell you easily how they feel, or where currently unrecognised added value may be possible.
The technology to compress audio files, turning them into mp3 files existed well before Apple turned it into the iPod. Sony was the tech master, they had led the miniaturisation of components, they even had arguably the ideal brand in ‘Walkman’, but they did not put it all together as Apple did. They extrapolated, rather than innovating in customer value delivery, as they simply did not recognise it.
If you want to be genuinely customer centric, stop treating opinions as instructions. Treat them as evidence. Ask what they were feeling when they said it. Ask what they were trying to avoid. Ask what risk they were trying to outsource to you.
People unconsciously decide with feeling, then they reverse‑engineer a neat explanation that sounds rational.
That’s why “listening to customers” so often produces incrementalism. You end up optimising the current system instead of escaping it.
Evolution doesn’t reward the most logical species. It rewards the most adaptable. Corporate life forgets this key fact. Leaders obsess over efficiency and certainty, then act surprised when the market moves under their feet.
Look at a beehive. A meaningful share of bees don’t optimise today’s nectar run. They explore. They go hunting for entirely new sources of nectar.
That looks irrational if you stare at this week’s spreadsheet. It’s essential if you care about next year, and the year after.
Customer centricity isn’t a slogan. It’s disciplined curiosity. It’s hypothesis, testing, and the courage to fund a few of your bees to fly the wrong way on purpose.
Just like a beehive, when we base resource allocation choices with long term impact on short term rational foundations, we miss all the creativity, colour and movement of what appears at first glance to be irrational behaviour, but which ensure survival.
Header: by Nano Banana
