Succeed, then start. Strategic lessons from a gardener.
My sister is a gardener, a producer of a prolific mass of colour and edible plants year round. It takes work, time, and planning, but as they say, the proof is in the pudding. By contrast, most businesses I work with have a strategic process that starts with a...
Discover ‘flow’ to build scale
The notion of 'flow,' or as we call it, 'In the zone,' is a psychological state first articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikenmihali, published outside academic circles in his 1990 book 'Flow: the psychology of optimal experience'. From time to time, most of us...
The new Revenue Generation paradigm
When was the last time you made a sale without the customer first doing a google search on their problem, and alternative solutions, before you knew they existed? A while ago I bet! Customers no longer need you, the information you have, and the products you sell,...
The curse of insider knowledge
When we know something, the automatic expectation is that those with whom we are communicating understand it equally well. This automatic, unrecognised assumption can be a barrier, and at its worst, a curse. Participating in a conversation a while ago where I was the...
Pray harder for leadership.
As I look out my window in suburban Sydney, there is a bluish tinge to the air. The fires around Sydney, and along the Australian east coast have made us all aware that we do live in a very dry continent, and that we do not value the water resources we have, in...
The 3 complications of calculating an accurate ROI on your digital marketing investment.
Self styled 'experts', flog all sorts of metrics that are supposed to tell you how well your digital marketing efforts are doing. Many of them do give useful information, but it is only ever partial. I am certainly one who loudly advocates the extensive use of data...
Where to now for the bashed-up dairy industry?
There is an awful lot of hand-wringing going on amongst politicians, bureaucrats of various types, and industry pontificators about the state of the dairy industry. Sadly, it has been going on for as long as I have been an observer, which is a long time! The...
13 Ideas to use analytics to improve the credibility of marketing investments.
Marketing is all about making assumptions about the future, and how your investment in marketing activity will enable you to deliver revenue and commercial sustainability. Therefore, making informed assumptions then testing their validity as you implement,...
9 process management questions from the World Cup finals
The process drives the outcome, right? Well, mostly. So long as the process directs the actions to be taken, the order in which they are taken, and is able to withstand external pressure when it is brought to bear, then yes, it will drive an outcome. We can look at an...
What do bees know about marketing strategy?
Bees are essential to our survival, they are fascinating insects. There is much we can learn from their habits, the outcome of millions of years of evolution. They do not just fly around at random, pollinating as they go, they are highly organised, focused,...