Review of produce marketing and its future
The future of produce marketing in Australia is fraught with difficulties that many who just buy their produce in the supermarket will never think about. The dominance of the chain supermarkets, lack of innovation, fragile investment outlook, environmental concerns,...
Who would buy shares in a Telco?
Telstra is one of the best yielding shares around, management knows there is no other reason to hold them, so effectively pump the share price with good yields. At the current prices they are a good buy, being assured of a juicy yield, and probably 50% market share...
SEO is the new benchmarking
Operational benchmarking was one of the "flavours of the month" for a long time in the nineties, until people realised that finding out what the best in class were doing, then expending resources to copy them, just ensured you never caught up, and at best, were one...
Behavior & Technical change
It seems that technical changes are facilitating behavior changes that were previously constrained by the practical and cost barriers that existed. However, the really important changes occurring are not the technical ones, but the manner in which consumers use them,...
A seat at the table, or a spot on the menu?
Negotiation is a process of finding a solution to a question that is acceptable to all parties. It should go without saying that the first step is to actually communicate, setting out to find areas of compromise, and places of potential value not immediately obvious...
What to do Vs. What is going on
Experience is hard won, experienced people have an intuition built up over time that is not always obvious, and is certainly not a "by the list" analysis of all the factors, weighing up the relative importance of each, and reaching a conclusion. Somehow it is a...
Invention or innovation
These two terms are often used interchangeably, but have a different meaning that I have mumbled about from time to time. This post on the PARC blog in response to Malcolm Gladwells article in the New Yorker is terrific articulation of the difference. "Simply put:...
Lean accounting
One of the reasons it is sometimes hard to keep a lean initiative alive, or indeed, get it past first base after the initial adrenalin has worn off is the manner in which the traditional accounting systems monitor performance. Often, accounting is the hardest...
The core of innovation
How easy it is to believe that the only thing needed for a successful NPD&C process is assets, money, people, time, capabilities, market position, and so on, but how often is it that the real innovations emerge from places where these benefits are absent. On those...
The Immediacy trap
"Immediacy" is perhaps the watch-word to describe the way in which our society works. Communication is so instant that we expect reaction to the communication to be just as quick, and this expectation of virtually instantaneous reaction can be a death trap for those...