Jul 18, 2025 | Branding, Marketing
When you ask that question: ‘What is the most effective word in Sales” of a group, any group, the majority will respond with the word ‘free’.
The problem of course is that the question included the word sales, and by definition, free does not constitute a sale, simply an exchange. It might lead to a sale down the track and often does which is why it is used so extensively to sell digital products, the so-called freemium model.
This however is not what I regard to be the most effective word in sales.
That word is ‘imagine’.
If you were and estate agent seeking to convince a young couple that the house they were looking at currently was the right one for them to buy now, there are a bunch of tactics you could use. Most would be articulating the benefits of the house, location, condition, number of bedrooms, quiet neighborhood, and so on.
By contrast if the agent simply used the words ‘ imagine carrying your new bride over the threshold of your new home‘ leads to a different conversation and probably outcome.
One of my clients, Windows Factory, sells and installs thermally broken uPVC windows and doors. The temperature stability and resulting comfort, coupled with the reduction in power costs delivered by this technology are wonderful. However, for some, the greater benefit is that this technology dramatically reduces transmission of outside noise.
The sales conversion ratio difference between these two statements is dramatic:
- ‘ These thermally broken uPVC windows reduce outside noise by 70%’
- ‘ Imagine being having a quiet conversation with your partner uninterrupted by the noise from the road outside’.
Try it. There is no limit to the domains where human imagination can take us.
All it takes is some thought that allows you to summon an emotional response to your offer, adding to any benefit delivered by a recitation of the rational benefits.
Header credit: The late, great, John Lennon.
Jul 15, 2025 | AI, Strategy
We are so busy debating whether AI will take our jobs, we’ve missed a more dangerous question: what happens when it takes the jobs that create our leaders?
So far, the brunt of automation has fallen on blue-collar roles. Machines took over factory lines, robots handled dangerous or repetitive manual tasks. But the spotlight is shifting. White-collar work, particularly at the entry level, is squarely in the crosshairs of AI. Roles in sales, marketing, law, accounting, admin support, anything process-driven or rule-based are already being swallowed up by bots, templates, and AI agents that never sleep, strike, or slack off.
In past industrial revolutions, we saw enormous upheaval in labour markets. Steam displaced the weavers. Mass production killed off artisans. Electricity reduced manual labour but turbocharged the rise of middle management. Each wave destroyed jobs but also created new ones. That’s the comforting story we tell ourselves.
But this time, the tempo is different. AI is rolling through industries faster than we can repurpose workers. We may eventually find equilibrium, but it’s likely that the rate of job creation will lag the rate of job destruction. And this time, it’s not just jobs on the line, it’s the culture, resilience, and leadership pipelines of entire organizations.
Most of the white-collar roles under threat are entry-level. These are the proving grounds where future leaders learn the ropes, earn their scars, and get spotted by mentors. Strip away those jobs, and what are we left with? A dangerously thin layer of next-gen talent. No feeders. No bench strength. Just a void.
This matters. Organisations depend on a steady flow of energetic, irreverent, risk-taking young guns to shake things up. These outliers challenge orthodoxy, surface new ideas, and eventually rise to reshape the culture. Remove the ground floor, and over time, the whole building becomes brittle.
We don’t yet know the full consequences. But we do have some clues. History is littered with unintended consequences when change is forced onto complex systems.
Consider China’s one-child policy. Designed as a population control measure, it has led to a demographic cliff. Too few young workers. A rapidly aging population. Long-term consequences no one foresaw.
Or nature: rabbits and cane toads introduced to Australia for pest control. Wolves removed from Yellowstone to protect livestock. In each case, the ecosystem was disrupted. Only decades later did we see the cascading damage, and in the case of Yellowstone, the healing when wolves were reintroduced.
The same pattern may emerge in our workplaces. AI may be brilliant at cutting costs and boosting productivity. But if it wipes out the very roles where human potential is first tested and tempered, we could be sowing the seeds of a cultural and leadership vacuum that won’t show up in KPIs until it’s far too late to fix.
Jul 4, 2025 | AI, Leadership
Most marketers wouldn’t know John Boyd if he jumped out of a strategy deck and tackled them. However, his OODA loop brainchild leverages the power of AI to turbocharge tactical marketing effectiveness.
Boyd, a maverick US Air Force fighter pilot and strategist, understood that survival in combat came down to one thing: speed of decision-making. The OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, then rinse and repeat was his insight that gave him the nickname of ’40 second Boyd’ He was never beaten in flight simulator dogfight combat. He understood that whoever cycles through that loop faster reshapes the contest and forces the opponent into reactive mode. In air combat, this meant living. In business, it means winning.
OODA is a mindset. AI is changing the tempo of that mindset in ways even Boyd could not have imagined.
AI can Turbocharge tactical Tempo
Until recently, the bottleneck in decision-making wasn’t data, or insight, or even creativity. It was people. Our slow, deliberate committee meetings, our weekly WIPs, the reviews that drag on longer than a Sydney DA approval.
AI doesn’t suffer these constraints. It observes more, faster. It orients by processing billions of data points in real-time. It proposes decisions with options and probabilities baked in. And it acts immediately when allowed, not months.
What used to be a quarterly campaign development cycle can now happen in an afternoon. And that changes everything.
The limiting factor is the siloed org chart.
The challenge isn’t getting AI to do the work. It already can. The real challenge is getting organisations to leverage the power of speed AI can deliver.
Too many CMOs are caught in the headlights, stuck in outdated governance and fear of missteps. They’re playing the game like it’s 2012. Time as a constraint is rapidly being removed. AI can produce a full marketing program overnight. Then it is handed to the organisational approval processes, often as decisive as my Aunt Mimi.
Meanwhile, your competitor, the one who slashed the approval chain and taught their AI what “on-brand” means, has already launched, learned, and iterated.
Leadership Is the Bottleneck
The real AI revolution is not technical. It’s cultural, and it is leadership.
Speed has become the underrated competitive edge. Not speed for its own sake, but speed to consider, learn, adapt, execute, and then repeat the cycle. This means leaders must rethink their role. They are no longer approval gatekeepers; they act as tempo setters. The conductor of a real-time orchestra where instruments never sleep and tempo changes every hour.
Reclaim the OODA Loop
Every time a decision is delayed, it hands the advantage to the opposition.
In Boyd’s world, if you could stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop, responding to changes faster than they could comprehend, you won.
AI lets us do that not just to competitors, but to markets, media shifts, consumer moods, even cultural trends.
But only if we let it.
As AI becomes embedded in workflows, the question becomes: who trains the AI?
Who owns the “brand brain” that defines tone, style, and judgment?
Smart brands are reclaiming that brain. They are training AI on their own assets and experiences, not renting a brain from their agency. That brain learns, evolves, and becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
Marketing to succeed in this new world must become an adaptive system.
In a world moving at AI speed, Boyd’s old dictum is truer than ever:
Decide fast. Act faster. Or die slow.
If you are not already building your AI-accelerated OODA loop, your competitors are. By the time you notice, they’ll be on to the next loop, and you may be headed for oblivion.
Jun 30, 2025 | Leadership, Management
As a consultant, I am often faced with managing the fragmented attention of my clients. The grass is always greener, and the new shiny thing syndromes are hard at work, particularly in the minds of the stressed owners of an SME, looking hard for an easier way.
Somehow, they must manage their limited resources of time, money, capability, operational capacity, and expertise, insulating themselves against the pull of the siren song of the silver bullet.
There is no substitute for the focussed application of all available resources on a market niche of some sort where there is a competitive advantage that can be defended. The niche may be as local as the best plumber close to your home, or as broad as a revolutionary application of technology to the world market, the logic remains consistent.
The late Charlie Munger had as part of his wardrobe of mental models one he called ‘The circle of competence.’ He credits this idea with much of the success he and Warren Buffett have had in Berkshire Hathaway.
In summary, he assesses all opportunities presented by determining if Berkshire Hathaway has a greater level of competence in the domain within which the opportunity lives than anyone else. The closer to the edge of the circle of competence, the less interesting it is, simply because there are others who know more about the drivers of long-term profitability than he does, and therefore in the long run, he is unlikely to win.
Many years ago, while working for Cerebos, I launched a breakfast cereal into test market in South Australia. It was a bridge between muesli, where Cerebos was a major brand in a small segment with Cerola (now disappeared from shelves) and the standard breakfast cereals, Wheat Bix, corn flakes and rice bubbles. It was a genuinely different product, offering a ‘bridge’ between the ‘tree hugger’ image of muesli, and the sugar laden three products that at that time stood alone in the market.
The launch was extremely successful, at first. Three months after our launch Kelloggs countered with a look-a-like product, ‘Just right’ and blew us away with the weight of advertising, power of the Kelloggs brand, and in store merchandising resources.
While it seemed that our new product, ‘Light and Crunchy’ was a logical and consumer centric expression of the trends in the marketplace, it was a step outside the ‘circle of competence’ of Cerebos. We did not have any competitive advantage in the general cereal market that could be leveraged after Kelloggs rubbed out the modest first mover advantage. It fell right in the middle of the ‘what you think you know’ circle of competence.
We did everything right, the longevity of ‘Just Right’ is evidence of that, but we did not sufficiently understand the drivers of our new competitor, Kelloggs, and the determination they brought to wiping out an interloper in what they saw as ‘their’ market. We were not sufficiently competent to be successful.
That insight came at considerable cost.
Jun 25, 2025 | AI, Customers, Lean, Operations
The idea of the OODA loop is to get inside the decision cycle of your opposition. Once inside, you control the outcome in the absence of some externality.
Toyota used this idea to destroy Detroit.
The Andon cord placed the power of tactical decision making about quality right at the point where it was needed, with the workers on the production line.
By this means, quality problems were identified and fixed before they moved a further step towards the customer.
It also did something else.
By identifying and fixing problems at the source, the cycle of problem fixing was accelerated greatly. Not every problem can be fixed immediately at the line, but there are processes for escalation, from the front lines to the lowest level that is empowered to address the problem. That escalation involved suppliers when the problem was caused by a supplied part that was substandard.
By contrast, Detroit was driven from the top down, being run by spreadsheets (handwritten until the 90’s) by executives who may never have seen the inside of the factory.
A problem as it escalates up a chain of command has many opportunities to be buried, forgotten, miscommunicated, all of which will happen, driven by all sorts of human frailties and power games. The end result, the little problem in the factory compounds and becomes a big problem with customers, which costs a lot to address, and ruins reputations.
Toyota got well inside the time it took Detroit to respond to problems. While Detroit was escalating or hiding quality problems, Toyota was fixing them and moving on the next improvement.
They were inside the OODA loop of Detroit, and it destroyed the American car industry.
AI is now giving users an easy tool to get inside the decision cycle of their competition, while seeing the productivity benefits drop to their bottom line.
How are you going to deal with that?
