A Future Made in Australia: Does feeding ourselves count?
The recent declaration of "A Future Made in Australia" by the Prime Minister has put the future shape of the nation’s manufacturing sector back on the agenda. There was however, nothing specific on the importance of agricultural innovation and value...
Why special purpose teams often don’t work.
Special purpose teams are generally formed to solve a problem. However, it seems that 'collaboration' has become so integral to many corporate cultures, that every problem becomes an opportunity to ‘collaborate’. Teams are often formed without sufficient...
Political Strategy: Choose between the now and the future.
Our current politics is an intensely adversarial, short-term, zero-sum game. Is this what is best for the country? The federal budget is due in a few days. Based on the selective leaking and conversations happening, the budget will be focused, or at...
Is 3% of GDP the right answer to our manufacturing complexity problem?
As we seek to move towards 3% of GDP as a measure of the R&D in the economy, we are assuming that simply increasing the percentage will increase the output, in some sort of linear manner. Ranking as we do at 93 on the Harvard list, squeezed between...
How do we measure and value resilience?
'Resilience' is a word we are hearing a lot these days and will hear more today. On this ANZAC day 2024, there will be a lot of words sprayed around that amount to acknowledgement of the resilience of ANZAC troops. They clung to the cliffs on the...
The hidden cancer of your battery-powered device
Suddenly, everyone is interested in batteries. When mobile devices took off after the launch of the iPhone, the demand for batteries with a longer life than the then existing chemistry could deliver took off as well. Panasonic held a dominating position in this...
Should we be ‘wisdom leveraging’ baby boomers?
The following is a post that I drafted at the beginning of the Corona epidemic but did not post. It is a personal reflection on ageism, that becomes increasingly relevant as older, retired workers I see around me now going bonkers from boredom. Few want the...
Should Dr Chalmers listen to Dr Kahneman in framing the coming budget?
We lost an intellectual giant last week, Daniel Kahneman. Psychologist and Nobel prize winner in economics, he along with long term collaborator Amos Tversky, created what has become known as 'Behavioural Economics’. So what you say. In 2010 Kahneman...
Does analysis give you the truth?
It seems that 'the truth' is a malleable concept. We are overwhelmed by opinion masquerading as fact, economic and social models designed to deliver a predetermined outcome, managed correlation equated to causation, and market research that asks the...
The only way to solve a problem.
The only way to solve a problem, particularly a significant one is to understand the cause of the problem and eliminate that cause. Rip the band-aid off. Taking a short-term action to address a symptom of a problem is just kicking the can down the road....