Wisdom has a context
Strategy is about choice, which market, customer, technology, and so on. Never has this black and white choice been so stark a challenge as in publishing, as the established operators struggle to find profitability in the electronic age. Fairfax in Australia recently...
Disrupted sales process
The web has disrupted the sales process, as well as just about everything else in our world. Just think about differences between how the process works now, and how it used to work. It now starts with a web search by a prospective buyer, after a team has identified...
Apple mortgage?
The shape of Apple after Steve Jobs has been a source of much scribbling, and the launch on Friday of the newest version of its golden goose, the iPhone 5 has given us a peek. The razzamatazz has been huge, Apple all over, but they delivered what the pundits view as...
Website chook-house
In a chook-house, there are both chickens and eggs, all mixed up, and hard to tell which chicken laid which eggs. It is a bit like the web, full of sites that could belong to any number of businesses. As a part of a project a while ago looked at the sites of a range...
The Challenge of Analytics
We have access to huge amounts of data, "Big Data" in current parlance, but wading through it all, and finding the few insights that will make a difference is a task our fathers really did not have, it is the tail side of the coin, the head being the value of the...
The “2 F’s” of life
The two "F's" of life scare us all, Failure, and caused by the fear of failure; Finishing. Because we do not want to fail, most of us avoid finishing. We procrastinate, take on "busy-work" or "easy-work" to avoid the necessity to finish the important things, and...
Manage by customer, by leveraging data
Would you rather do business with someone who knows a lot about you, and demonstrates they have your best interests at heart, or some stranger, enriching themselves? Pretty obvious answer, so why do so few retailers seem to be able to respond?. The ability to collect...
Risk portfolio management
Most enterprises are pretty familiar with project portfolio management, which always include a risk rating attached to each project. What happens if we turn the notion around, and consider the portfolio from the perspective of the risk profile of the whole portfolio,...
The Serve & Volley of selling
In tennis, the simplest point, and if you do it well the most effective, is the serve and volley. Put in a good serve, and follow up with a volley that puts the point away. Same in selling. The serve: Ask a simple question to which there is only one answer, The...
results wall
A modest sized marketing services agency I do occasional work for has an awards wall, where industry peer bestowed awards appear, a feature of most service agencies I have seen. However, theirs has two wrinkles Beneath each award is a further rating, done in...