Sep 25, 2026 | Demand chains, Governance, Sales
To a potential customer, an instant quote delivered on a website sounds wonderfully convenient. Enter a few parameters, click a button, and out pops a price.
Sadly, for the marketer, such a process does not answer a key question marketers should be desperate to answer:
Why.
Different customers want different outcomes, for different reasons from their purchase. Understanding the drivers, differences, and context of that demand gives the marketer the tools for a successful sales conversion and retention program.
A supplier who pauses to ask a few questions adds friction. They also give themselves a chance of gathering information that serves to best meet the needs of the customer, which sometimes means recommending something that does the job required better.
‘Remove friction’ has become one of those marketing instructions we repeat until we stop thinking about it. Usually, it makes sense. Complicated navigation, repeated requests for the same information, and forms that demand your life story before releasing a brochure all deserve the bin.
The trouble starts when we treat every pause as a defect.
Some purchases deserve a bit of thought. Customers need to understand a compromise, test a claim, or explain a problem they have never had to describe before. Skipping that work may accelerate the sale while leaving the misunderstanding intact.
The friction has not disappeared. You have simply moved it to being a complaint, demand for replacement, or an argument about who promised what.
For a small business, that can turn a promising sale into an expensive distraction.
The salesperson gets another order. Operations inherit an awkward job, and then spends the margin trying to make the customer happy.
A few useful questions at an early point can be seen as unnecessary friction. It can also be seen as an investment in a superior delivery of value to a customer.
That is an investment that is worth making. It reduces warranty and service claims, makes for happy customers, so increases the probability of a referral, the very best form of marketing there is.
Sensitive questioning at an early point can ‘qualify a customer’, an increasingly resource hungry activity for most B2B marketers. It can also set the marketer up as an expert in their field, and most would prefer to deal with an expert rather than a generalist, or unproven supplier.
Creating the opportunity to demonstrate your product delivers value greater than any competition is the point of all ‘top of the funnel’ activity or content.
These questions take time and require thought in their construction. It also requires those answering to make a modest ‘investment’ of their time. That is the point. Those who are unlikely to become customers are more likely to be turned off by the questions, while those with a genuine problem to be addressed, are more likely to make that investment. The friction creates an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
Do not demand technical specifications from someone who needs your help to work them out. Do not ask for a detailed brief merely to discover whether you serve their suburb. Explain your limits early, and ask for information when you can show how it helps.
The effort should match the decision.
Someone exploring options needs useful information.
Someone asking you to commit people, capacity, and to a price needs a more substantial conversation.
This cuts both ways. If you expect the customer to invest time answering questions, invest some of yours explaining the choices they face. Give them enough information to decide whether you deserve the next conversation.
Then watch what happens beyond the enquiry form.
A shorter form may produce more enquiries while consuming hours of estimating time on work you cannot do profitably. A longer conversation may produce fewer quotes and better jobs. Neither result justifies a victory lap until you examine the selling time, the margin, and whether customers got what they expected.
Watch the people who leave, observing any commonalities that may be a useful filter.
A falling enquiry count does not prove you have filtered out unsuitable buyers. You may have annoyed some viable leads, so care must be taken.
Every extra step should earn its keep by helping the customer make a sound choice and your business keep its promise.
Before you remove the next piece of friction from your sales process, ask what mistake it prevents.
Sep 15, 2026 | Governance
A farmer looking at a field has choices.
He can plant wheat, he can plant corn, or he may even divide the field and plant some of each.
What he cannot do is plant both across the whole field and promise two full harvests.
By contrast, the crop of politicians we now have are increasingly asking us to believe that they can deliver such an outcome.
Political rhetoric resembles agricultural catalogues written by people who have never had mud on their boots. Every party promises more services, lower taxes, cheaper essentials, generous subsidies, and protection from almost every unpleasant consequence of economic reality.
No major party owns this temptation. They all know that promising the harvest wins more votes than explaining the limits of the field. Luckily, there are a few individuals who call out the illusion, and present an alternative outcome.
Strategy requires choice.
A farmer chooses wheat for a mixture of quantitative and qualitative reasons. He considers soil moisture, seed prices, fertiliser costs, available machinery, and a forecast of the expected price at harvest.
He also applies judgement built through years of experience. The numbers inform the choice, shape probabilities, identify risks, and the possible impact of factors out of his control, but the farmer must make the final choice. They are also accountable for the outcomes, as they generally stick around for the long haul, rather than wandering off to a sinecure offered by a vested interest.
A serious national strategy faces the same problem.
Governments must choose among defence, health, education, infrastructure, energy, housing, welfare, tax relief, and debt reduction. Every choice consumes money, labour, capital, and political attention that cannot then go somewhere else.
However, politicians never campaign on the opportunity cost. It seems that recognising that a dollar spent on ‘A’ is a dollar that cannot be spent on ‘B’ unless it is borrowed is now politically toxic. Before Covid, there was vigorous attention paid to the budget deficit, it had become a political football. Since Covid, that attention has disappeared as if the debt undertaken to fund current consumption has no impact on the ability to grow the economy in order to fund future consumption.
They promise wheat and corn from the same field, then increase the promised harvest by borrowing against future seasons, and that extra field they claim to have planted.
Government borrowing to fund immediate consumption at the expense of productive assets incurs the obligation to pay interest.
Every kid in school learns about the impact of compounding, while not necessarily understanding the maths. Politicians chasing votes today ignore the reality of compounding, compromising future ability to deliver what they are promising.
Future taxpayers inherit the obligation to service the debt. They also inherit fewer choices because interest payments consume revenue before a future government considers a school, hospital, road, or tax cut.
Australia has not yet wandered into a sovereign debt crisis. The Parliamentary Budget Office judges the long-term position sustainable under its central assumptions and notes that Australia carries less debt relative to GDP than many comparable economies.
That reassurance seems fragile to me, and deserves the acknowledgement that they are knowingly incurring a debt that must be paid, at some point. Being less screwed than the other bloke should not be a safety blanket.
The Parliamentary Budget Office forecasts national public debt interest payments rising from $54.2 billion in 2026–27 to $77.2 billion in 2029–30. It identifies interest as one of the fastest-growing areas of government spending. Each new deficit adds to the field already claimed by previous promises.
Borrowing can make excellent sense when it funds productive infrastructure, capability or reform that expands future output. By contrast borrowing to finance current consumption, conceal trade-offs or purchase temporary political affection offers a different proposition. The electorate gets the lolly today, but their kids get the dental bill.
Meanwhile, our political conversation routinely loses sight of the forces that expand the field.
Productivity, investment, skills, functioning markets, reliable energy, infrastructure, and competent institutions drive long-term prosperity. They determine how much value Australians can produce and retain from the resources available.
Australia’s labour productivity fell 0.6 per cent in the March quarter of 2026 and grew just 0.3 per cent over the year. Hours worked grew faster than output. That represents the economic equivalent of working the tractor longer while harvesting almost no additional wheat.
The political rewards for fixing this problem arrive slowly, too slowly for the current crop of pollies to publicly acknowledge.
The costs arrive immediately. Reform creates visible losers, uncertain benefits, and angry television interviews. A subsidy creates a grateful recipient before the evening news. Every person with children understands it is easy to give something, even of the response is muted. However, taking it away is a different usually noisy, emotional, and seemingly massive matter of importance.
Our political structures have trained voters to focus on the next payment, rebate, or concession. Politicians then point to that behaviour as justification for offering more of the same. The transaction has become brutally simple: vote for us now and trust us to manage the consequences later.
Trust once helped bridge the gap between immediate sacrifice and future benefit. Recent experience has weakened if not yet destroyed that bridge.
Pandemics, wars, commodity shocks, inflation, and interest-rate changes have demonstrated how quickly events outside government control can demolish confident forecasts. Political failures have also shown that sometimes the electorate placed its trust badly.
None of this makes strategy less necessary. It makes honest strategy more important.
A government cannot guarantee the weather. It can choose what to plant, explain why, acknowledge what it must leave unplanted and invest in the things that improve the probability of a worthwhile harvest.
That would require politicians to treat voters as adults. It also requires that voters trust them to behave like adults, and to be focussed on the outcomes for their kids, rather than the trappings of the immediate.
Neither outcome seems probable at this point.
Aug 26, 2026 | AI, Governance
In 1984, Dr. Robert Cialdini published Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, outlining the six core drivers of human compliance:
Reciprocity,
Commitment & Consistency,
Social Proof,
Authority,
Liking,
Scarcity.
Decades later, psychologist Daniel Kahneman expanded our understanding of human decision-making in Thinking, Fast and Slow. He demonstrated how our fast, intuitive “System 1” brains routinely rely on these shortcuts, or as psychologists call them: heuristics, as survival mechanisms.
Both psychologists turned authors issued clear warnings: these principles could be leveraged just as easily by bad actors as by those setting out to persuade for positive outcomes.
Cialdini wrote for an analogue world of salesman, direct mail, and print advertising. He could not have foreseen the impact of the internet, social media, and generative AI.
In the analogue era, persuasion took time and human effort. Today, machine learning algorithms execute Cialdini’s drivers at micro-targeted scale. The tiny safety mechanism that were present pre digital, of time to reflect on a choice has been removed by the instantaneous speed of digital. The opportunity for rational analysis to impose itself on an immediate emotional reaction has been dramatically reduced.
Social proof is manufactured via engagement metrics; authority is mimicked by credible sounding bullshit, scarcity is simulated through algorithmic urgencies, and consistency has built its own echo chamber that hardens peoples beliefs, even in the face of clear data to the contrary.
The result is systemic fragmentation.
Households, public discourse, political systems, and social licenses are splitting into opposing, highly polarised positions.
The forces Cialdini identified have not changed, they are the result of millions of years of evolution. What has changed is that AI now automates persuasion compounding the moral gap between the ‘Persuaders’ and those targeted for persuasion.
May 25, 2026 | Change, Governance
Economist Joseph Schumpeter observed in 1942, “economic progress, in a capitalist society, means turmoil.” That observation shows he had a good handle on the future as it is currently panning out. Chaos seems to be the order of the day, globally, as well as in this country.
The federal budget presented on May 12 was based on the principle of generational equity. Clearly, the tax pendulum has swung too far against Australians under 45 or so, in favour of their parents, and requires adjustment.
The incentivising of investment in real estate was enacted in the changes to the tax treatment of Capital gains in the 1999/2000 budget. Mixed with negative gearing which had been a feature of the tax system since 1936, it created a tax driven distortion in the allocation of capital, resulting in a shelter for investment in real estate.
Taxing capital gains has a potted history.
Prior to 1985 capital gains were untaxed, while wages and salaries were taxed at a 60% top marginal rate. Why should capital profits go untaxed while wages were fully taxed? This inequity created distortions in the deployment of capital. The Hawke government introduced a capital gains tax that matched the top marginal rate, excluding primary domestic residences in 1985, and reduced the top marginal tax rate to under 50%. The taxing of capital gains brought a fierce backlash. In 1987 there was a discount system put in place that recognised the impact of inflation on prices and removed the inflationary impact from any sale price for tax purposes. The changes in 1999 were aimed at simplifying the calculations to arrive at a taxable income that included capital gains, by introducing a flat 50% discount.
The backlash is evident again, as interest groups very effectively use the tools of AI combined with social platforms to rail against the proposed changes. While there are some areas where the detail in the budget was absent, and there are reasonable arguments against the blunt instrument approach in the budget, the principle was clear. Make the difficult changes now. Accept the impact on political capital for the benefit of the economy in the long term.
The pendulum swings again!
There was a lot of other stuff in the budget, but mostly it was business as usual and window dressing. This was not good enough in my view, when there are significant pressures coming from the changing environmental and geopolitical context that need attention.
A few of those are noted in the following sceptical notes.
-
-
- Climate change and the industrial challenges created in manufacturing largely generated by the pivot to electricity sourced from renewables rather than from fossil fuels and the accompanying/enabling technology is a huge change. We need to invest heavily in the technology and infrastructure of global electrification to catch the wave, or be left behind. We must ignore the anti-scientific and financial nonsense coming from some parts of the political spectrum demanding we remain wedded to fossil fuel. Kicking that can down the road, again, is just plain stupid.
- Digital has morphed into AI, and the hounds are, rightly, concerned about job losses, as the shape of organisations and daily work pivots to ‘done for you’ by a machine. The disruption will be substantial, and upon us very quickly, so we need to be prepared. We are not even doing the basic things that will prepare for the changes, such as thinking creatively about how to educate our kids for a world very different to the one we grew up in.
- The steady reversal of the economy from one relying on physical assets to services has made the measurement of just about everything that we see as the foundation of economic modelling redundant. Modelling the outcomes of policy and economic activity is now about as certain as the mumbling from the coloured tent in the corner of the fairground. We desperately need an agreed methodology to realistically measure progress on those parameters. GDP as a realistic measure of activity in the economy is nonsense when it cannot capture most of the activity in services. The cliché ‘if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it’ is as true in the case of an economy as it is in the management of an SME.
- Geopolitics is in turmoil. This is not just from the depredations of the current idiot in the White House, who has turbocharged it, and the grab by Russia to rebuild the USSR, but from the rise of China. 30 years ago China was an agricultural economy. Now it is the worlds manufacturing and industrial technology powerhouse. While domestic growth has slackened off, it has not stopped, but the rest of the world now relies on China for critical inputs to their supply chains for everything from advanced technology to manufacturing simple appliances, and Christmas ‘stocking-stuffers’. Where to next for China? I think it will attack the sclerotic economies of the west by buying in and disrupting the comfortable order that prevails. For example, European and US car manufacturing is being killed by Chinese imports of EV’s. So, they respond with various barriers that protect their own industries. The natural response from China will be to buy into the market either by start-ups or buying established brands, and building manufacturing capability behind any barriers. Chinese firms already own Volvo, MG and Lotus. Who is next? Volkswagen? The Chinese strategy is clear, and driven by long term thinking, not the next election cycle.
- Australia is not immune. International investment in Australia is essential for our economy. To date it has largely been US and European investors, we have a somewhat xenophobic attitude to Chinese investment, noting we cannot easily invest in China, and if we do, the conditions are onerous. However, we need them more than they need us, so the outcome is obvious. Australia and the western world generally has prospered under the umbrella of international trade fostered by the US since the Marshall Plan set about rebuilding Europe and Japan after the war. Now that plan is in tatters, torn up by its parent. We however, remain wedded to it as the US is so deeply integrated into our economy, while no longer being our biggest trading partner. That guernsey goes to China, the recipient of the openness of world trade, and now in a position to shape it through its domination of the key commodities and technologies of the early 21st century. That reality is yet to work its way into the Australian narrative in any way beyond observations of the importance of China as the major buyer of coal and iron ore. We were taught a painful lesson about the power of China to dictate terms under the previous government. The position we hold as a critical supplier of commodities will diminish over the next 25 years as Chinese integration into mineral wealthy Africa comes of age. What will we do then? Nothing in the budget even gives a hint of preparation, indeed, we continue to spend heavily on straw men like AUKUS.
- Australian R&D, both public and private is low by standards seen in competitive economies. It is also fragmented by our governance system that feeds turf wars at every level of activity. If we set about designing a governance system with a clean sheet of paper, there is no way we would end up with what we currently face. Therefore, it should be a priority of the government, every government, to remove the duplication, waste and opportunity cost such a system encourages. The budget did allocate a small increase in funding for CSIRO, but also directed that the current headcount reduction continue. Other changes to the R&D tax incentive and allocations to specific projects were also announced, but none to address the central challenge of doing the science, then turning it into a commercial outcome.
- The US S&P is driven by tech companies. Of the top 10 in market value, only Berkshire Hathaway is what might be termed ‘Old industry.’ In Australia it is the exact reverse. Of the top 10 only CSL could be termed ‘new industry’. Notably, several unicorns born in Australia have migrated, Atlassian and Canva being the poster children of this migration, but by far, not the only ones. We must find ways to create and nurture innovation. Progressively taking the axe to public expenditure on science, as noted above, is not a good start.
- November 2022 saw the public release of ChatGPT, which kicked off the AI ball. Subsequently, AI-related stocks have registered 76% of the S&P 500’s return, 87% of earnings growth, and 90% of Capex growth. The returns in the US, upon which much of our super returns rely is reliant on the ‘magnificent 7’, and most specifically Nvidia, continuing their growth driven by AI. Shakey ground indeed for the future prospect of returns when we are increasingly reliant on a superannuation system heavily invested in the S&P to fund retirement.
- We have an ossified political system. It is however, starting to break down, exemplified by the capturing of seats by ‘Teal’ candidates who removed the heart of the Liberal party over the last 2 elections, and the rise of the policy free bluster-ball that is One Nation. We need imagination and vision in the national parliament, and the courage to follow through. The outdated structures need to be at least renovated if not removed. We should start by limiting or even removing corporate donations to political parties. The alternative is a publicly funded system, open to citizens, and capable of receiving donations from citizens with a limit. The limit is to prevent rich individuals and businesses donating more than a concerned citizen on a median wage can afford. That might begin to earn the title of ‘Democracy’, and put a brake on the ability to influence policy choices by vested interests.
This is not a complete list, but it touches most of what concerns me about the direction we are taking.
Header: My thanks to Hugh McLeod for once again, capturing a complex idea in a simple graphic.
Mar 30, 2026 | Governance, Leadership
In the pre-internet age, facts had a pedigree. You could trace them back to a source, weigh their credibility, and argue your position with some confidence. These days, we are so awash with claimed ‘facts’ that we are overwhelmed. Cheap, mass-produced, often anonymous ‘facts’ handed from one digital platform, morphed and handed on again. No clear origin, no accountability, just noise, self-serving claims, paranoia, or dreams, dressed up as certainty.
That creeping uncertainty has seeped into every corner of our lives, mostly unnoticed. The rules we live by are still shaped by politicians and enforced by institutions funded with our tax dollars. But the values behind those rules have all but disappeared.
We used to look for consistency. If someone claimed to value integrity, we expected them to act like it. Now we get performative posturing. Followed by policy U-turns, PR spin, or flat-out contradiction.
When behaviour doesn’t match the values on the label, it screams hypocrisy. As the old marketing joke goes ‘the consumer is not stupid, she is your wife’
We’re hardwired to trust facts. However, when the ‘facts’ themselves are selectively shaped, bent to fit a narrative, or worse, manufactured from thin air, we get understandably anxious and likely to distrust.
In its mild form, this is spin. In its extreme form, it’s lying. Denial. Gaslighting.
Hypocrisy is no longer just the politician’s disease; it has crept into every corner of our lives.
Public debate has been hijacked by competing ‘facts’. Not competing opinions. Competing truths. There’s no transparency, because transparency forces accountability. When nobody is accountable, integrity goes out the window.
Integrity now is so rare we wouldn’t recognise it even if it walked up and smacked us with a code of conduct.
The result? Polarisation.
Information travels faster than reflection. The moment a ‘fact’ hits the feed, the rebuttal, if it exists at all, is buried under a pile of clickbait. And if by chance a real fact does slip through, one that’s been tested, sourced, and stands up to scrutiny, it gets drowned in the noise.
Knowledge used to mean something. Now it’s riddled with bias, spin, and wishful thinking. Often wrong. Always louder than it should be.
That erosion of clarity has gutted our trust in political systems. We expect spin, so we ignore or do not recognise the occasional truth when it confronts us. When we stop trusting the institutions, we stop trusting what they publish, even when they’re right, imagination and conspiracy theories take their place.
What follows is stubbornness disguised as principle.
We cling harder to our own view, no matter how flawed. We trust only those who confirm it. Collaboration becomes competition. Dialogue turns into tribal shouting.
Meanwhile, confirmation bias is doing its work: steering our decisions, shaping our teams, and wrecking our ability to truly listen.
So, what’s the fix?
Truth. Accountability. Transparency. Not slogans. Actions.
Tell the truth based on facts you can trace. Show your working. Hold yourself and others to the same standard. Accept that facts evolve, but insist that the path of that evolution is open for all to see.
That’s how you earn trust back. One uncomfortable truth at a time.
Header credit: A single panel from and old ‘First dog on the moon’ cartoon says it all.
Mar 2, 2026 | Governance, retail
As a kid Mum used to make a Christmas pudding and claim that the fairies had magically stuck in a bunch of threepences and sixpences into it. (yes, I am that old)
The possibility of finding a couple of weeks pocket money in the pudding created intense sibling rivalry around who could sneak the biggest piece, and thus have a greater chance of finding some magic.
Coles and Woolies in their most recent results announced in the last fortnight have delivered the Australian community a magic pudding.
Times are tough, there is a cost of living crisis happening around us, yet their recently released year end results hide magic for shareholders. (to be fair, most of us are now shareholders via superannuation)
The domination of these two chains is fuelling inflation.
This is a perspective not covered in any of the commentary I have seen so far.
The logic is as follows:
Margin expansion.
Coles and Woolworths have been able to preserve, and in Coles’ case expand, healthy margins over the past year. Together, they control roughly 60–65% of the supermarket sector, with Aldi and various independents supplied by wholesalers (usually Metcash) making up most of the rest. This means that for most packaged food and grocery suppliers, the path to survival runs through the trading terms imposed by just two buyers.
The latest financials show that Coles has widened its supermarket margins from 26.6 % to 27.4% and its EBIT margin edged up from 5.0% to 5.3%. Woolworths’ Australian Food division reported a gross margin of 28.6% and EBIT margin 5.4% in FY25, only slightly down from the previous year after a period of “price investment”. In other words, the duopoly has not absorbed the inflation shock through lower profits; it has kept margins high and, in Coles’ case, increased them.
The cost of living crisis has not dampened the margins of Colesworth during the tough times.
Retail real estate.
Coles and Woolies dominate shelf space and therefore set the ‘reference prices’ that other retailers follow. As a result they influence price inflation far beyond their own stores.
Woolworths and Coles use their buyer power to squeeze suppliers via terms demands, rebates, expensive promotional deals, and all the other tricks they have in their magic pudding. The power suppliers are able to exert in these pricing negotiations is extremely limited. This applies even for major key suppliers in major categories for whom supermarket volumes are essential to covering operating overheads. Colesworth are then able to set shelf prices with no reference to any competitor beyond the other gorilla. Suppliers must accept lower margins and/or push up prices in other channels just to survive.
Smaller independents, convenience outlets, foodservice and export customers then face higher input costs, which in turn pushes their retail prices closer to and usually way above the duopoly’s. They rely on ‘convenience’ and stores in population centres below the cut-off for the gorillas to invest in outlets.
The more the big two protect or expand their margins under the cover of “inflation”, the more this cost‑shifting machine drives price rises right across the grocery market.
‘Colesworth’ market share sets prices and terms across two thirds of Australia’s FMCG market.
Scale delivers price immunity to Colesworth
Oligopoly economics.
This is an oligopoly at work. They are taking advantage of a general inflationary environment to widen or protect margins, and establishing a sticky price level that will persist when inflationary pressures ease. That will be a nice windfall!
In a genuinely competitive market, we would expect that at least some of the pain of higher energy, labour and logistics costs shows up in thinner supermarket margins.
In Australia’s hyper‑concentrated grocery sector, the evidence points the other way. Without Aldi as an anchor, we would be in real trouble at the checkout.
Increasing costs are not impacting on Colesworth margins. Their scale enables them to push EBIT above 5% by pushing price up faster than the cost increases.
Medicine unavailable.
Unfortunately, I see no short-term measures that will reverse the concentration it has taken the 45 years I have been observing, to evolve. Politicians can have all the enquiries, reports, and ‘band-aid’ measures they can dream up, but none will get at the core problem other than breaking up the oligopoly. Forced divestiture.
I have written elsewhere that this is a really stupid idea. A legislated breakup would only increase costs significantly in the supply chain that would be felt at the checkout. It is therefore only a brainfart of those who will never see government, but which persists as a policy option.
The horse has not just bolted, it is over the hill. It will take another 20 years for changes in the retail environment to deliver a more genuinely competitive sector.
Header: My thanks to Scott Adams. The single Dilbert panel says it all.
