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...
Status quo defense as a profit detector.
Aggressive defense of the status quo by powerful firms, or a consortia of firms in some sort of industry lobby body often indicates a fat profit plum ripe for the plucking, or a closed shop that protects inefficiency. Perhaps they are the same thing. Look at the...
Lead from the rear.
Two meetings in two days that demonstrated to me one of the key attributes of a leader. The first, the group shut up until the leader said his piece, making sure everyone in the room knew he had a strongly held view. Everyone rushed to agree with him, despite the...
The other CV
Most people spend a lot of time polishing their CV's, particularly whe they are on the lookout for an alternative role. However, how relevent is the paper CV in the age of the cyber-presence? The first thing a prospective employer will do is google you, and hopefully...