“Adverfanning”, a new marketing challenge.
Advertising has a new coat, "adverfanning" as in advertising to attract "fans" for your social site, who are then the target of directed or "Permission Marketing", a term coined by Seth Godin over a decade ago. Adverfanning has been growing exponentially with the...
Laugh to succeed
When was the last time you saw people around the water cooler laughing like a bunch of kids, in work-time? Did you think that perhaps they were being frivolous, wasting the organisations time? If you did, you would not be alone, as we seem to take ourselves too...
Opportunity cost and value
Opportunity cost is a concept well understood, and often used in a theoretical sense, but not often is it translated into something easily understood. In a store just before Christmas, I was tossing up between two brands of domestic coffee machine, that appeared...
The “F” generation
Yes, another alphabetically numerated generation for us to get our heads around, the F of "Facebook" generation. These kids, born in the mid eighties, have grown up connected. To them, Facebook is more than a tool, it is a part of their social fabric, fundamental to...
Business purpose revisited
I've written a bit over time about the value of a unifying business purpose, the way it can unify and motivate the stakeholders of an enterprise, often beyond the boundaries of just employees. It is all easy to say, but apparently very hard to do, as the number of...
Easy decision matrix.
A couple of years ago working with the CEO of a family company as it struggled for commercial sustainability in an increasingly hostile environment, we came up with a 3 part package by which to judge all the competing priorities that were on the table. There had to be...
Lean & Six sigma sustain each other.
Lean is at its core a management system, a holistic way of looking at the way an enterprise manages itself through a culture tuned to improvement, group and personal responsability, while six sigma is a quantitative process of managing in quality by getting it right...
Management and power
Being in a position of senior management offers the opportunity for the exercise of power, and as we know, power corrupts. But why should it be so, and how can we protect ourselves, and our colleagues from the adverse impacts of power poorly exercised? It seems that...
Australia Day reconsidered.
Amidst all the public utterances on Australia Day by elected representatives keen to be seen for a moment on the tele, in print, or lauded in the blogosphere, calling for a wiser, more compassionate, considerate, and outward thinking Australia, ….. (add your own...
Successful on-line communities require a promise
Linux started with a promise, one that formed the basis of what has become a major player in the server operating system market, with a current share somewhere around 45%. Linus Torvalds back in 1991 posted the following message on a discussion board inhabited by...