7 Leadership lessons from my granddaughter.
Little kids are just amazing to watch, before they have absorbed the rules of thinking and behavior that we adults impose on them. My granddaughter is just three, and yet she displays many of the leadership characteristics so admired in the libraries...
Mad Men have morphed into Math Men
Don Draper would be really pissed, his world has changed. His brand of advertising is as dated as the Model T. Instead of having hundreds of creatively driven ad agencies, all competing aggressively for your business, which involved selling you on a...
Mary Meeker 2018 KPC&B Internet trends report
The 2018 KPC&B report is now out, and gathering views on Slideshare like a runaway train. The amount and speed of the attention given to this now annual report is evidence that it has become the benchmark for analysis of the digital...
How ‘Systems Thinking’ should be applied to marketing and governance.
We think about marketing reasonably often in business, not often enough, but reasonably often. However, our thinking is usually muddled, and wrong. Let me explain. We think about marketing as if it was a discreet set of actions that can change the fortunes...
Is the supermarket business model about to be retired?
The face of the supermarket in the 2030's is emerging, and I suspect it is not a face most of us will warm to immediately. The combination of artificial intelligence and the capacity to automate just about everything will render much of the current...
4 questions to enable you to extract maximum leverage from your marketing investment
Imagine you are faced with the task of joining two pieces of wood. What information are you likely to need before deciding how to go about the task? How big and important are the pieces? Are they structural weight bearing? Is the joint going to be seen?...
Who will pay for tomorrow’s hospitals?
I did not watch the royal wedding. That does not mean I am a republican, or anti-monarchist, it simply means I am not interested. If they want to get married, let them get on with it, they do not need the approval of the masses. After all, they are both...
How much do I need to spend on marketing my new business?
This 'How much' question was posed to me recently in a networking group by a young professional who had just left the comfort of a large corporate firm to strike out on her own with a business partner. My answer: ‘Depends’. There is never a right answer...
Four strategic questions raised by Manufacturing Week and CeBIT
The juxtaposition of two trade shows, Manufacturing week last week, and the current CeBIT, have raised some questions in my mind about the road on which we are travelling. I spent the best part of two days at Manufacturing week, and yesterday at...
How do you measure culture?
With an increasing regularity, 'Culture' emerges as an item to be 'managed'. I fully expect it to be front and centre before the end of the current Royal Commission into the financial sector, as most of the poor practises we have seen , immoral, unethical,...