Apr 20, 2026 | AI
In June 2025 Deloitte exposed the innards of the Federal trough into which the consulting firms had inserted their snouts.
A report prepared for the Department of Employment and Workplace relations was published on the department website before it was recognised that it was littered with errors, references to papers that could not be found, made up quotes, and misinterpretation of facts. These were on top of errors of grammar, syntax, and simple spelling.
Deloitte was rightly forced to repay part of the $440,000 contract.
Why not all of it?
For this to happen at a top of the tree consulting firm, compounded by the inattention of the department, certainly means the rest of us should be critically aware of the potential of AI to hallucinate.
LLM’s function by looking for the next word (token) that best fits the sentence or paragraph. It tries to please, so when it identifies a gap for which there is little or misleading information, it has the potential to just make stuff up and make it up in a way that looks completely authentic.
It’s like a student trying to cover what he does not know by sounding authoritative.
The only way to prevent this is to have your own robust verification protocols that require human review of every AI generated citation, claim, or statistic somewhere in your workflow. This is now dramatically easier than it was a few months ago as a URL can accompany each citation. You can also limit the sources from which information is pulled to specific, high quality domains.
At its core, AI is just like a very smart, inexperienced new intern. Trust their output only after critical human review. Wise humans are increasingly necessary in the new world of generative AI. As the sophistication of the AI tools increases, so does the potential for creating credibility out of nothing.
Somebody should have told Deloitte, but it does not really matter to them. The stuff-up was a tiny component of the millions in contracts they extract from government.
A junior probably got fired as a token of remorse.
Apr 9, 2026 | Management, Small business
The Reserve Bank hands down its next rates decision on 5 May.
The cash rate already sits at 4.10%. Markets and many commentators still expect at least one further rise on May 5, probably followed by at least one more. Against this backdrop, there is a federal budget trying to deliver on the social undertakings made to the electorate, while dealing with a structural deficit, soft consumer confidence, and geopolitical uncertainty, particularly as it relates to energy.
This is a toxic mix for SME’s, which despite being largely ignored by governments, are still the backbone of the economy.
That mix should sound familiar to anyone old enough to remember the 1970s. Growth stops, costs increase, consumers keep their hands in their pockets, and the cycle repeats.
That is when small businesses fail.
Whether the Reserve Bank raises again or pauses, the core message for SMEs stays the same.
Do not wait for certainty: Prepare now.
Tough times do not usually kill a business in one dramatic moment. They kill it by progressively tightening a dozen small screws at the same time. Debtors pay later. Stock turns slower. Quotes sit longer. Margins erode one discount at a time.
The businesses that come through rough periods usually do a few simple things early and do them hard.
- They preserve cash.
- They accelerate every cycle time in the business.
- They protect gross margin like it is oxygen.
- They stay close to good customers.
- They cut vanity spending and keep useful spending.
And they remember an old truth Warren Buffett expressed well: when times get tough, cash gives you options. Opportunity often knocks when nobody feels like opening the door.
The following specific advice has been heard many times, but once more will not hurt.
Know your cash position.
Know your true cash position every week, not intermittently once a month, every week, or better still, every day. Chase debtors hard, but with wit and humanity, as they are probably also suffering as you are.
Run a 13-week rolling cash flow forecast. Update it every week. Assume at least some customers will pay later than promised because they will.
Accelerate cycle times.
Every process has an established cycle time that ‘settles’ into a comfortable rhythm when times are OK. When times get tougher, those that can accelerate their cycle times will win.
This is particularly the case with your cash conversion time. To speed that up, quote faster, invoice the same day, chase deposits sooner, work operational assets harder, and reduce if not eliminate rework. Get jobs finished, signed off, and billed without dead time between steps.
The lessons of John Boyd and his OODA Loop are never so relevant as in a crisis.
Protect gross margin.
Tough markets tempt owners to discount just to close the sale. That usually backfires. The better tactic is to sell on value, drop unprofitable work and reprice where you can.
Complexity creates transaction costs, which are always hard to see. Removing complexity frees up cash to be used productively.
Keep your best customers close.
Your existing customers are cheaper to retain and increase your share of their ‘wallet’ than new ones are to win.
Call them, collaborate to solve their problems, check in before they complain, and ask for referrals and testimonials.
Cut costs carefully.
Across the board cost cutting is a desperate mistake. Do not slash the parts of the business that help you sell, collect cash, or keep customers.
Cut the ‘vanity’ and nice to have costs aggressively, not the activities that generate revenue, margin, and cash.
Tighten inventory management
Stock that does not move is just dead cash.
Reduce slow-moving lines, buy smarter, Increase visibility on lead times and reorder points. Stop over-ordering to ensure ‘safety stock’. Aggressive management of cycle times in your inventory can have a dramatic impact on working capital requirements.
Pareto the pareto
Not all customers, and products deserve to survive. The Pareto rule always applies, not always as 80:20, but it is there.
Identify the customers, products and jobs that produce real margin and reliable cash. Defend those first. and progressively eliminate those that do not contribute. When you have done the first round, do it again, you will always find more that can be productively removed. You are in effect, stress testing the revenue and cost generation base of the business.
This exercise intimidates many SME’s, who tend to form emotional ties to products, customers, and distribution channels. In tough times, emotion must be set aside.
Renegotiate early.
Banks, landlords and suppliers all hate surprises. They will listen more carefully and be more accommodating when they are a part of the process of ensuring bills will be paid, even if a bit late.
Secure facilities early. Reset terms where needed. Ask for flexibility while you still look like a good risk.
Keep hustling for sales
A weak market is not a good excuse for sloppy selling.
Tighten follow-up. Improve conversion rates. Shorten the path from enquiry to proposal to close. Make it painfully easy for the right customer to buy.
Stay visible
Marketing investments are often the first savings made in any downturn. Resist the temptation, as history clearly demonstrates that those that keep investing during the tough times come out way stronger when the worm turns. Besides, when others pull their marketing, you become more visible for no extra cost.
Be aware of bargains.
Downturns create bargains. Competitors stumble. Good staff become available. Assets get cheaper. Market share can move. Cash lets you act while others freeze.
Lift your prices.
This is sure to give some the ‘wobbles’ and is always difficult, but if you have done all the above, you will be delivering real value to customers. An extra dollar added to the revenue line drops straight through the P&L onto the profit line. There is no quicker way to increase financial resilience than to lift prices while holding volume. Even if you drop a bit of volume, do the maths, and 9 times in 10 you will be better off after the price rise.
Header credit: Scott Adams and Dilbert
Mar 30, 2026 | Governance, Leadership
In the pre-internet age, facts had a pedigree. You could trace them back to a source, weigh their credibility, and argue your position with some confidence. These days, we are so awash with claimed ‘facts’ that we are overwhelmed. Cheap, mass-produced, often anonymous ‘facts’ handed from one digital platform, morphed and handed on again. No clear origin, no accountability, just noise, self-serving claims, paranoia, or dreams, dressed up as certainty.
That creeping uncertainty has seeped into every corner of our lives, mostly unnoticed. The rules we live by are still shaped by politicians and enforced by institutions funded with our tax dollars. But the values behind those rules have all but disappeared.
We used to look for consistency. If someone claimed to value integrity, we expected them to act like it. Now we get performative posturing. Followed by policy U-turns, PR spin, or flat-out contradiction.
When behaviour doesn’t match the values on the label, it screams hypocrisy. As the old marketing joke goes ‘the consumer is not stupid, she is your wife’
We’re hardwired to trust facts. However, when the ‘facts’ themselves are selectively shaped, bent to fit a narrative, or worse, manufactured from thin air, we get understandably anxious and likely to distrust.
In its mild form, this is spin. In its extreme form, it’s lying. Denial. Gaslighting.
Hypocrisy is no longer just the politician’s disease; it has crept into every corner of our lives.
Public debate has been hijacked by competing ‘facts’. Not competing opinions. Competing truths. There’s no transparency, because transparency forces accountability. When nobody is accountable, integrity goes out the window.
Integrity now is so rare we wouldn’t recognise it even if it walked up and smacked us with a code of conduct.
The result? Polarisation.
Information travels faster than reflection. The moment a ‘fact’ hits the feed, the rebuttal, if it exists at all, is buried under a pile of clickbait. And if by chance a real fact does slip through, one that’s been tested, sourced, and stands up to scrutiny, it gets drowned in the noise.
Knowledge used to mean something. Now it’s riddled with bias, spin, and wishful thinking. Often wrong. Always louder than it should be.
That erosion of clarity has gutted our trust in political systems. We expect spin, so we ignore or do not recognise the occasional truth when it confronts us. When we stop trusting the institutions, we stop trusting what they publish, even when they’re right, imagination and conspiracy theories take their place.
What follows is stubbornness disguised as principle.
We cling harder to our own view, no matter how flawed. We trust only those who confirm it. Collaboration becomes competition. Dialogue turns into tribal shouting.
Meanwhile, confirmation bias is doing its work: steering our decisions, shaping our teams, and wrecking our ability to truly listen.
So, what’s the fix?
Truth. Accountability. Transparency. Not slogans. Actions.
Tell the truth based on facts you can trace. Show your working. Hold yourself and others to the same standard. Accept that facts evolve, but insist that the path of that evolution is open for all to see.
That’s how you earn trust back. One uncomfortable truth at a time.
Header credit: A single panel from and old ‘First dog on the moon’ cartoon says it all.
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.
