The Australian myth.
The new focus on Rural and regional Australia (R&RA) in the current parliament has great merit in ways hard to quantify. The nature of "Brand Australia", how we see ourselves, has always been about the wide brown land, the sunburnt country, the Akubra hatted...
Make it easy to do business
A frustrating "customer service" experience recently reminded me of this lovely parody of customer service meets lean principals. If it wasn't so true, it would be funny. Getting customers is hard, and getting harder, so when one comes to your door it is for a reason,...
Brand building brilliance.
The communication alternatives are mind-boggling today, but sometimes someone comes up with an innovative way to combine them. Imagine Social Responsibility Marketing linked with social networking and the broadcast media, backed by comment around the world, for what...
5 Sales sins.
Sales is something we all do, all the time, professionally as well as in our private lives. We may not always be selling a product for an employer, but we will be selling our ideas, priorities, time, and experience, in some way. Here are some simple rules: Talk as...
Digital trust
It seems that there is something at work that is largely unnoticed. We no longer trust what we read in newspapers, but we tend to trust what we see on the net, weather it be in wikipedia, on a site like Business Spectator that has journalists of real stature, or in...
New media Politics.
Isn't it interesting, the next election in NSW will be contested by a large number of independents, and they will all have a shot at being elected. It is pretty easy to just put this down to the appalling dross we have been putting up with for ages, but is it the only...
Leadership and market research
The thing about market research is that it can only elicit responses to the questions that are asked from within the context of what they already know and understand. Innovative solutions are rarely a result of asking a group, or committee, about what they would like....
Digital no substitute, just complementary.
Why is it that in the face of plummeting communication costs, and remarkable availability of new tools to make it easy, that business travel continues to grow? On first glance, we should be travelling less, not more, but on further consideration, perhaps it is the...
Product Development Portfolios that work.
Creating and managing a development portfolio is a critical factor in the success of most commercial enterprises, but one that is done poorly in many I have seen. Some recent with a client struggling with the challenge for his organization served to clarify my...
Transparency and blame
Achieving transparency is at the core of a lot of what I do in the fields of demand chain development, strategic alignment, and mentoring leaders. Transparency enables emerging problems and issues to be identified, and addressed quickly, efficiently, and with a...