Oct 5, 2026 | AI
My youth was spent in the surf on Sydney’s northern beaches.
From time to time after suffering a wipeout well before the days of leg-ropes on surfboards, I would find myself pounded by a succession of large broken waves that severely tested my lung capacity, and ability to push back on a creeping feeling of panic.
I am getting the same feeling from the waves of AI generated and enabled bullshit hitting me progressively, it seems every minute of the day.
Our capacity to distil meaning from the avalanche of words, images, theories, selective fact presentation, and complete bullshit is being drowned.
When being crunched by this set of waves, ask yourself 5 questions.
- What is the source of the data/story
- What does it really show/mean?
- What action is required?
- Who is responsible, by when?
- What are the anticipated, testable outcomes?
Finding answers will not stop the waves coming at you, but it will help you push back, take a deep breath, and swim for solid ground.
Sep 28, 2026 | Branding, Marketing
A workshop with idle machines needs a different management and marketing tactic from one that cannot reliably deliver the work it has already sold.
Yet the pro forma solution from many ‘digital marketing gurus’ would be to ‘generate more leads.’ For one, it may be sensible advice, for the other, totally wrong.
The same business can move from the first situation to the second in the blink of an eye. The advice that helped fill the order book can then make the delivery problem worse.
Good marketing advice carries small print, ‘be sceptical, trust your instincts, and understand all the numbers’. The ‘numbers’ always includes the elusive, hard to measure factors that are often the game-changers.
We make grand assumptions constantly. An impressive case study becomes a conference presentation, then a rule that everyone should follow. Somewhere along the way, we lose sight of the buying cycle, the available resources, and the particular customer problem the business set out to solve.
Consider the instruction to concentrate on retaining customers because keeping one costs less than finding a new one. Usually this is very good advice.
For a subscription business losing customers through poor service, understanding why customers are not renewing would usually be better. Spending more on acquisition while customers leave in frustration just gives the service department a larger queue of complaints that leads to further erosion.
However, a roofing contractor cannot persuade a satisfied homeowner to need another roof next year. The relationship still matters for referrals and reputation, but growth requires access to other people who need a roof. A retention campaign that ignores the purchase cycle solves a problem the business does not have.
Even where customers buy regularly, the economics deserve scrutiny.
A discount to someone who would have bought at the normal price reduces margin without changing behaviour. Retention only creates additional value when your action changes an outcome worth changing. The constant promotional pressure exerted by supermarkets on suppliers has served only to erode supplier margins and destroy brands.
Then there is the instruction to put more money into the marketing activity that delivers the best measurable return. Sensible enough, provided you understand what the measurement tells you, and it is a useful addition to your understanding of customer behaviour.
A customer may hear about you from a colleague, read your material, and later search for your business by name. The final enquiry tells you where they entered the sales process. It does not, by itself, explain what persuaded them to look for you.
Move all your money towards the activity that collects the enquiries, and you risk starving the activities that created the interest. You can improve the reported efficiency of your marketing while weakening its ability to generate future demand.
That does not give anyone permission to hide poor performance behind the words “brand building.” It means you need evidence that suits the decision, and a measurement period that respects the buying cycle.
The common mistake in these examples is accepting the prescription before diagnosing the problem.
More leads assume you can profitably serve more customers. Retention assumes you can influence another purchase or prevent a worthwhile customer from leaving. Increasing a marketing budget assumes the next dollar will create enough additional value to justify its cost.
Write down the assumption before you approve the activity, and then ask what evidence would show you that it no longer holds.
“It depends” offers no help unless you can explain what it depends on, and how that changes the decision.
Nor should we use context as an excuse to discard experience whenever a fashionable idea comes along. Understanding the customer, keeping promises, and earning an adequate margin remain essential to success. The tactics we use to achieve them needs more frequent examination.
The practical question is what constrains profitable growth here, now. A shortage of suitable buyers requires a different response from poor conversion, inadequate capacity, or a service failure.
Before accepting the next piece of marketing advice, ask: “What would have to be true for this to work in my business?”
If the adviser cannot answer that, a larger font on the presentation will not help.
The character of Don Draper in ‘Madmen’ depicted in the header probably said it best.
Sep 25, 2026 | Demand chains, Governance, Sales
To a potential customer, an instant quote delivered on a website sounds wonderfully convenient. Enter a few parameters, click a button, and out pops a price.
Sadly, for the marketer, such a process does not answer a key question marketers should be desperate to answer:
Why.
Different customers want different outcomes, for different reasons from their purchase. Understanding the drivers, differences, and context of that demand gives the marketer the tools for a successful sales conversion and retention program.
A supplier who pauses to ask a few questions adds friction. They also give themselves a chance of gathering information that serves to best meet the needs of the customer, which sometimes means recommending something that does the job required better.
‘Remove friction’ has become one of those marketing instructions we repeat until we stop thinking about it. Usually, it makes sense. Complicated navigation, repeated requests for the same information, and forms that demand your life story before releasing a brochure all deserve the bin.
The trouble starts when we treat every pause as a defect.
Some purchases deserve a bit of thought. Customers need to understand a compromise, test a claim, or explain a problem they have never had to describe before. Skipping that work may accelerate the sale while leaving the misunderstanding intact.
The friction has not disappeared. You have simply moved it to being a complaint, demand for replacement, or an argument about who promised what.
For a small business, that can turn a promising sale into an expensive distraction.
The salesperson gets another order. Operations inherit an awkward job, and then spends the margin trying to make the customer happy.
A few useful questions at an early point can be seen as unnecessary friction. It can also be seen as an investment in a superior delivery of value to a customer.
That is an investment that is worth making. It reduces warranty and service claims, makes for happy customers, so increases the probability of a referral, the very best form of marketing there is.
Sensitive questioning at an early point can ‘qualify a customer’, an increasingly resource hungry activity for most B2B marketers. It can also set the marketer up as an expert in their field, and most would prefer to deal with an expert rather than a generalist, or unproven supplier.
Creating the opportunity to demonstrate your product delivers value greater than any competition is the point of all ‘top of the funnel’ activity or content.
These questions take time and require thought in their construction. It also requires those answering to make a modest ‘investment’ of their time. That is the point. Those who are unlikely to become customers are more likely to be turned off by the questions, while those with a genuine problem to be addressed, are more likely to make that investment. The friction creates an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
Do not demand technical specifications from someone who needs your help to work them out. Do not ask for a detailed brief merely to discover whether you serve their suburb. Explain your limits early, and ask for information when you can show how it helps.
The effort should match the decision.
Someone exploring options needs useful information.
Someone asking you to commit people, capacity, and to a price needs a more substantial conversation.
This cuts both ways. If you expect the customer to invest time answering questions, invest some of yours explaining the choices they face. Give them enough information to decide whether you deserve the next conversation.
Then watch what happens beyond the enquiry form.
A shorter form may produce more enquiries while consuming hours of estimating time on work you cannot do profitably. A longer conversation may produce fewer quotes and better jobs. Neither result justifies a victory lap until you examine the selling time, the margin, and whether customers got what they expected.
Watch the people who leave, observing any commonalities that may be a useful filter.
A falling enquiry count does not prove you have filtered out unsuitable buyers. You may have annoyed some viable leads, so care must be taken.
Every extra step should earn its keep by helping the customer make a sound choice and your business keep its promise.
Before you remove the next piece of friction from your sales process, ask what mistake it prevents.
Sep 21, 2026 | Management, Strategy
The world is divided in many ways, but every way that divides also compresses down to a strategic choice most do not consider.
Are you operating in a world dominated by a Gaussian distribution, or a power distribution?
We are all familiar with the normal curve, which is a gaussian distribution. Many, if not most things across the commercial, natural, and institutional worlds we live in operate on a normal curve. Human height, manufacturing variation, travel time to work, cricket scores, heads thrown in a game of two-up. All are plottable in a normal curve, and the larger the sample, the more ‘normal’ the curve becomes. It is the statistical basis of every political poll you have ever seen.
Italian mathematician Vilfredo Pareto noted the wildly differing income levels amongst Italians. This pattern did not comply with the normal curve leading to the insight that reversion to the mean did not apply at a micro level. The differences in income of individuals, 80% of which accrued to 20% of Italians, led to the 80/20 ‘Pareto rule’.
Wherever you look, you see the pareto rule at work. A closer examination often also reveals a power distribution playing a key role.
Cricket is a game where the scoring is constrained by the maximum of 6 runs. Hit the ball over the boundary on the full, and it is six runs. Whether the ball clears the boundary by an inch, or by 100 meters, the maximum runs scored is six. However, if you were to perform a power distribution of the batsmen who had hit a six in test matches, the 80/20 rule prevails. Of the 1,828 sixes scored by Australians in test matches over the last 25 years, the top five batsmen scored 79.6% of them, the other 448 batsmen combined scored the other 21.4%.
By contrast, Rugby league is not constrained by a maximum. The score in Saturday evenings semi-final game between Cronulla and Easts was 46 to 10. The commentators were discussing the chances of Easts breaking 50 in the last few minutes of the game, as there is no limit applied to scoring beyond the time of the final whistle ending the game.
These differing perspectives lead to the question referred to in the header: Are you in a commercial context that is constrained by a reversion to the mean, or are you competing in a ‘pareto-like’ context?
The obvious follow up question is ‘does that optimise the commercial outcome’
The domain you are in drives the nature of the strategic choices made.
A domain dominated by a power curve business model is one where many bets are laid, knowing most will fail, but the few that work will deliver a disproportionate share of the total value delivered by all bets. The challenge is that those that will deliver the disproportionate outcomes are unknowable when the bets are laid. Typically venture capital works in this domain.
To continue the cricket analogy, coaches might look for the characteristics that made Gilchrist, Smith, and Co the outliers amongst the long tail of cricketers who score none or few sixes in their careers, and coach them to hit those sixes. Most will get out even more quickly than they normally would if trained for defence, but perhaps one or two might join the elite group in the 20% club.
In the bell curve or gaussian analysis, incrementalism is the driving force. Coaching the average test bowlers to turn their average test scores from 6 or 7 into the teens over time will optimise their capacity to contribute to the total reliably.
Long term success depends on both approaches being applied judiciously, as trade-offs must be made.
Scott Boland has a bowling strike rate of 39 balls per wicket of Australian test bowlers over the last 25 years, and a batting average of 9. He struggles to find a place in the test team other than in the absence of Hazelwood, Stark or Cummins, despite having the best balls/wicket ratio. (let’s not debate the obvious impact that his balls/wicket ratio is heavily influenced by his astonishing 7 for 55 in the 2021 boxing day test)
As someone running a business, you must also make these trade-offs between incrementalism and ‘hitting for the fence’ in the ways that best suit the circumstances of the business and its competitive context.
Note: explanation of header graph.
- The top 5 scorers of the 1,828 sixes hit over a 25-year period, Gilchrist 5.5%, Hayden 4.5%, Ponting 4.0%, Warner 3.8%, and Smith 3.7%, together account for 79.6% of all sixes hit by all 453 Australian test batsmen over the last 25 years.
- 276 players hit no sixes, the average being 3.9 sixes each.
- Gilly, is 8 standard deviations from the mean, making him, as we knew, a freak!
Sep 15, 2026 | Governance
A farmer looking at a field has choices.
He can plant wheat, he can plant corn, or he may even divide the field and plant some of each.
What he cannot do is plant both across the whole field and promise two full harvests.
By contrast, the crop of politicians we now have are increasingly asking us to believe that they can deliver such an outcome.
Political rhetoric resembles agricultural catalogues written by people who have never had mud on their boots. Every party promises more services, lower taxes, cheaper essentials, generous subsidies, and protection from almost every unpleasant consequence of economic reality.
No major party owns this temptation. They all know that promising the harvest wins more votes than explaining the limits of the field. Luckily, there are a few individuals who call out the illusion, and present an alternative outcome.
Strategy requires choice.
A farmer chooses wheat for a mixture of quantitative and qualitative reasons. He considers soil moisture, seed prices, fertiliser costs, available machinery, and a forecast of the expected price at harvest.
He also applies judgement built through years of experience. The numbers inform the choice, shape probabilities, identify risks, and the possible impact of factors out of his control, but the farmer must make the final choice. They are also accountable for the outcomes, as they generally stick around for the long haul, rather than wandering off to a sinecure offered by a vested interest.
A serious national strategy faces the same problem.
Governments must choose among defence, health, education, infrastructure, energy, housing, welfare, tax relief, and debt reduction. Every choice consumes money, labour, capital, and political attention that cannot then go somewhere else.
However, politicians never campaign on the opportunity cost. It seems that recognising that a dollar spent on ‘A’ is a dollar that cannot be spent on ‘B’ unless it is borrowed is now politically toxic. Before Covid, there was vigorous attention paid to the budget deficit, it had become a political football. Since Covid, that attention has disappeared as if the debt undertaken to fund current consumption has no impact on the ability to grow the economy in order to fund future consumption.
They promise wheat and corn from the same field, then increase the promised harvest by borrowing against future seasons, and that extra field they claim to have planted.
Government borrowing to fund immediate consumption at the expense of productive assets incurs the obligation to pay interest.
Every kid in school learns about the impact of compounding, while not necessarily understanding the maths. Politicians chasing votes today ignore the reality of compounding, compromising future ability to deliver what they are promising.
Future taxpayers inherit the obligation to service the debt. They also inherit fewer choices because interest payments consume revenue before a future government considers a school, hospital, road, or tax cut.
Australia has not yet wandered into a sovereign debt crisis. The Parliamentary Budget Office judges the long-term position sustainable under its central assumptions and notes that Australia carries less debt relative to GDP than many comparable economies.
That reassurance seems fragile to me, and deserves the acknowledgement that they are knowingly incurring a debt that must be paid, at some point. Being less screwed than the other bloke should not be a safety blanket.
The Parliamentary Budget Office forecasts national public debt interest payments rising from $54.2 billion in 2026–27 to $77.2 billion in 2029–30. It identifies interest as one of the fastest-growing areas of government spending. Each new deficit adds to the field already claimed by previous promises.
Borrowing can make excellent sense when it funds productive infrastructure, capability or reform that expands future output. By contrast borrowing to finance current consumption, conceal trade-offs or purchase temporary political affection offers a different proposition. The electorate gets the lolly today, but their kids get the dental bill.
Meanwhile, our political conversation routinely loses sight of the forces that expand the field.
Productivity, investment, skills, functioning markets, reliable energy, infrastructure, and competent institutions drive long-term prosperity. They determine how much value Australians can produce and retain from the resources available.
Australia’s labour productivity fell 0.6 per cent in the March quarter of 2026 and grew just 0.3 per cent over the year. Hours worked grew faster than output. That represents the economic equivalent of working the tractor longer while harvesting almost no additional wheat.
The political rewards for fixing this problem arrive slowly, too slowly for the current crop of pollies to publicly acknowledge.
The costs arrive immediately. Reform creates visible losers, uncertain benefits, and angry television interviews. A subsidy creates a grateful recipient before the evening news. Every person with children understands it is easy to give something, even of the response is muted. However, taking it away is a different usually noisy, emotional, and seemingly massive matter of importance.
Our political structures have trained voters to focus on the next payment, rebate, or concession. Politicians then point to that behaviour as justification for offering more of the same. The transaction has become brutally simple: vote for us now and trust us to manage the consequences later.
Trust once helped bridge the gap between immediate sacrifice and future benefit. Recent experience has weakened if not yet destroyed that bridge.
Pandemics, wars, commodity shocks, inflation, and interest-rate changes have demonstrated how quickly events outside government control can demolish confident forecasts. Political failures have also shown that sometimes the electorate placed its trust badly.
None of this makes strategy less necessary. It makes honest strategy more important.
A government cannot guarantee the weather. It can choose what to plant, explain why, acknowledge what it must leave unplanted and invest in the things that improve the probability of a worthwhile harvest.
That would require politicians to treat voters as adults. It also requires that voters trust them to behave like adults, and to be focussed on the outcomes for their kids, rather than the trappings of the immediate.
Neither outcome seems probable at this point.
