Invest in the unexpected.
One of the most widely known strategy tools is the SWOT, but it is widely misunderstood. Often there is confusion about what is a strength, and what is an opportunity, similarly, what is a weakness, and what is a threat. Strengths and weaknesses are internal to the...
Finding good employees in a downturn should be easy.
Right? Probably wrong 90% of the time. Superficial logic says when there are lots of people looking for jobs, it should be easy to find one to do yours, this may be true, but is it the right person for the job???. A colleague of mine is looking for drivers, there...
The risk & return of IT
One of my clients is currently undergoing a risk management exercise, pretty ordinary, albeit important stuff. List all the conceivable risks, rate their probability of occurrence, consider the impact if they occurred, and the consider the costs of mitigation. From...
Apologies are ammunition
It is unusual for a leader to apologise on their own volition, for anything from a minor misjudgement, to a major fluff-up, but when they do, it gives great assurance to those around that the person is human, and big enough to publicly concede a mistake, and the...
Reconsider the “facts”
A short while ago I found myself in a fairly robust debate about the merits or otherwise of the various industry "marketing & R&D" bodies that have inhabited Australian agriculture for decades. Dairy, meat, Horticulture, grains, all have, or have had, a range...
Ahead of the wave.
Seth Godin is once again ahead of the wave with the launch of Brands In Public. The logic is simple, today, you cannot control the conversations that occur about your brand or business, they happen across the myriad of access points to the web, so the next best thing...
The many brands of branding
Green marketing, Eco marketing, carbon aware marketing, food miles marketing, Cause marketing, all are segments of "marketing" that have potential appeal to an "aware" group of consumers that just a few years ago would have been lumped together, and considered to be...
A picture still tells a thousand words.
Seth Godin a short time ago wrote a post on priorities, goes to the heart of the dilemma we all face, sorting our own version of The priority list . Then Tom Fishburne reflects Seths observations in one picture. What more needs to be said, or drawn?
BHAG or wishful thinking?.
There is a growing trend driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals... BHAG),and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG outcome. Often however, the opposite appears to occur, as those in the...
The questionable value of numbers.
Modeling scenarios has become a pretty big business, but notice that you often get only the numbers out of the end of the model, rarely the assumptions that drive the outcomes, and rarely a range of options. This has been brought home again as I read the "strategic...