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...
There but for the grace…
Here is something that should scare the pants off any thinking Australian. Into the last week of an election campaign notable by the lack of anything notable, apart perhaps from the diligent application to the pork barrel to marginal seats in Queensland, and a...
A retailers nightmare
How do you compare prices in a range of stores when standing in the aisle of your local supermarket? The easy answer now, is "on your iphone". A crowd called Red Laser have an app that scans the code, compares the product/price to others scanned (presumably there is...
Gender equality; how?
There is lots of hand-wringing going on again about gender equality in the executive suite the boardroom, and particularly the political arena. All thinking people recognise the value of ensuring half our population has the opportunity to maximise the return to...
The “Banksters” are back
"Banksters", an emotive term coined by Father Charles Coughlin, a commentator in the early thirties as the practices of bankers and financiers during the boom in the lead up to the Wall Street crash in late 1929. It seems that the Banksters are back in 2010 as the...