The elasticity of status quo.
With apologies to my economist friends, the notion of demand elasticity can be applied to the status quo in an organisation. Embedding change in an organisation is remarkably hard, the status quo is capable of absorbing lots of punishment, and when the belting is...
Perception drives good decision-making.
30 years ago when housebrands were making their first inroads into Australian supermarkets, I took over management of Fountain tomato sauce. At the time it was a runaway market leader in NSW, but was being badly hurt by emerging cheap housebrands, priced a few cents...
Selling is believing.
Your high potential new customer, the one you thought you had brought into the fold, was about to sign up, the one you had assured the boss would place their first order next week, suddenly, at the 11th hour, inexplicably, they go elsewhere. Are they mad? Did they...
Politics trumps policy
When this Parliament came to us "hung", as it were, I hoped that its nature would engender a vigorous debate, the merits of policy would take centre stage as the various sides argued their point of view. Naively, I believed it would be an improvement on the staged...
Value chain sustainability.
The word sustainable holds connotations of farming practices, and environmental sensitivity, all true, but only half the story. A sustainable chain must also be commercially sustainable, and one without the other is by definition, unsustainable. The characteristic...
Digital Darwinism.
It is simply a fact of life that digital media is evolving faster than the existing institutions around it, particularly the regulatory ones. The decision during the week to reverse the Federal Courts decision on the streaming of "almost live" NRL and AFL games by...
Advertising: cost or investment?.
The costs of advertising only get counted when you do lousy advertising. When you place an ad, and you get a great response, the costs are never considered, but place a lousy ad, getting little response, then the cost is alarming. Therefore the task is to be...
What we share and how we are seen.
Emotional intelligence, EI has a whole lot of psychological mumbo jumbo surrounding it, a search will turn up almost a million articles. So, I'll simplify all that by saying it is the capability a person has to empathise and then engage with another individual and/or...
Reputational Capital.
Trust is a greatly over-used word in management conversations, and has therefore lost much of its meaning, becoming a cliché for "lets hope". People trust brands when they deliver consistently over time, but trust is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom, you need...
Cognitive Surplus
This is a term coined by Clay Shirky to describe the ideas, skills, knowledge that resides in peoples minds, and on enterprise shelves, unused, ignored, and sometimes actively avoided. His argument is that there has been a huge shift in behavior, no longer are we...