How do you choose?
This almost completed Federal election was about a lot of things, many of them contradictory, and beyond the wisdom of the bulk of the electorate to distinguish the rhetoric and spin from the facts. Does the sad view of the crumbling social and economic infrastructure...
Collaboration lessons from Canberra
This hung election has generated a tsunami of comment, but nothing I have seen on the mechanics of collaboration, a key factor in any lasting resolution to the impasse I would have thought. The idea of a "party" is simply an expression of the need for group action to...
Scale, speed and technology
The challenge of competing successfully in the digital age is to build the advantages of scale, without the inertia of the bureaucratic structures that usually come with it as a means to manage and control activities and investment priorities, not to mention the...
Mass amateurisation
15 years ago the task most organisations were applying themselves to was "mass customisation". How do we mix the cost benefits of mass production with the individual needs of the customer? Dell redefined the PC market by finding ways, as retailer Zara transformed...
The more things change…….
Conventional wisdom of the past decrees that copyright is essential to the well-being and motivation of the suppliers of the publishing stock in trade, authors. This self serving position is contrary to mountains of evidence accumulating as the web goes into its...
Leaders give you eight things.
Leadership is a subject that has filled libraries, kept researchers in businesses, and academics interested for decades. However, anyone who has been around organisations for a while probably sees it a bit more simply if they have given it any real thought. To me, a...
Anatomy of a great brand
Almost everyone has heard the term "Dow Jones" or perhaps "The Dow" and know at least that it is something to do with stocks in the US, but few would immediately think of it in the context of a brand. It probably would not get onto a list of the most famous brands,...
Value, not just price.
Commodity markets have two things in common: There is plenty of business to go around, that is why it is a commodity market. In a mature, saturated market, the challenge is to attract some of the business that is around, not build a new market. Customers focus...
Why? To: Why not?
A newspaper asks itself "why should I publish this??" It costs to publish, time, management resources, labor, time on presses, ink, paper, and so on, so it is a key decision, with implications if you get it wrong. An individual by contrast can now ask themselves 'Why...
The Curator and the future newspaper
The word curator brings to mind an old bloke (mostly) running a museum, deciding what is displayed, and how, what gets bought or created, what gets thrown out, and what gets saved for another day. The job of an editor in the one-way media (print, radio, TV) is...