Speed, effectiveness and waste.
Last week I spent over 2 hours on the phone to Optus trying to fix something they had stuffed up, the third try, after speaking to their techies and emailing the bloke who "signed" a form letter to, thanking me for taking on the service they stuffed up. Annoying? no,...
To succeed, increase your rate of failure. Bollocks.
The cult of failure, the belief that by failing we succeed, has some very real and adverse consequences if taken literally. It gives excuses to those who would choose to be sloppy in their consideration and preparation of an experiment, behaviour that would get you...
Emotional mistakes in negotiation.
Negotiation is usually difficult, that is the nature of things when two parties are setting out to maximise their outcome. Whilst it may not be a win/lose situation, where the parties set out to make the pie bigger, or different before cutting it up, it nevertheless...
Organic opportunities abound
On Friday I made a very modest contribution to the proceedings of the Organic and Green trade show in Sydney. A bunch of committed, passionate people, working their collective butts off to build businesses that deliver on the organic promise to consumers. The numbers...
Tesco and social media marketing.
Tesco is the leader in the field of retail social media marketing, as noted in the past, but have really outdone themselves with this experiment with a virtual store in railway stations in South Korea. The speed at which innovations are being tested, and if...
Carbon switcheroo
Last time I bang on about the anomalies surrounding the carbon tax, promise. I find it ironic that the party of so called free enterprise is calling for taxpayers to fund all the pain of the necessary adjustments, whilst the party representing the left of politics,...
Brand resurrection
Really good brands often display remarkable resilience to the depredations of those who do not understand what makes a great brand, and from time to time, one is resurrected by insight and hard work. I am not a gardener, but the most appropriate metaphor appears to be...
Social network cartography
There is a powerful new analytical tool on the block, "social network cartography" for lack of a better term. The masses of data now becoming available are able to be analysed with respect to the networks that exist amongst people. If your friends are obese, the your...
6 Collaboration misconceptions
Collaboration is as much about planning and hands-on work down in the weeds as any other sort of work. It is very easy to see collaboration as the new panacea for many challenges, but it is as hard work as anything else that is successful. It is also easy to read a...
When customer feedback does not matter
Sometimes asking a customer, or potential customer what they want is a bad strategy, as they can only respond from the perspective of what they already know and understand. When you have something different and unknown to offer, there is not much point asking, you...