Sep 18, 2025 | Change, Innovation, Leadership
The secret isn’t glamorous. It’s not an app, a hack, or a shiny new framework.
It’s the part everyone pushes down the priority list as they break a problem into its component parts. The hardest bit. Break the problem into its pieces, then go straight at the hardest part first.
AI now helps us do the problem analysis faster. It can model options, run simulations, and point out blind spots. However, it cannot focus your attention on the hardest bit first, that requires you.
Failure is the toll on this road. Edison’s “I now know what doesn’t work” wasn’t optimism, it was realism. Most attempts will miss. Data won’t rescue you when you’re in uncharted territory. Only cycles of trial, error, and learning will.
And here’s where humans stumble. We hate failure, and often failure has consequences in corporate life, so we become risk averse. We look for shortcuts, silver bullets, or easy wins. AI makes the shortcuts more tempting because it gives us mountains of plausible-sounding answers in seconds. But plausible isn’t proven.
The real advantage belongs to people who can keep their “discovery tempo” steady, using AI as an accelerant while still accepting that most paths will be cul-de-sacs.
AI has changed the speed and nature of problem-solving. What hasn’t changed is the rule: robust innovation comes from persistence through failure. The cycle is now faster, but the psychology hasn’t shifted.
So, the winners will be those who combine two rare qualities: the resiliance and patience to face repeated failure, and the discipline to use AI not as a crutch, but as a lever to attack the hardest part of the problem first.
Sep 3, 2025 | Leadership, Operations
Derek de Solla Price was a British physicist and scientific historian perhaps best known for his work on the Antikythera mechanism. After researching scientific papers and their authors, he proposed that in any field half the ground breaking work comes from the square root of the number of participants in the field.
In a company of 100 people, the real work of innovation and improvement is done by just 10. Similarly in a company of 10,000 people, the really key employees number 100.
More recent research indicates that the actual distribution is more skewed than Price hypothesised.
While the maths may remain consistent, the bigger the company the more invisible will be those few people who are the key to improvement.
If you are one of those key people buried in the bowels of a large enterprise not only must you do your regular job, but the extras you do also need to be noticed and the value of that extra effort understood.
If you are the leader of such a business, it is a key task for you to identify nurture and advance the few square rooters you are likely to have as employees. You may find they are the ones causing trouble, refusing to follow accepted but unspoken ‘rules’, questioning the status quo, and experimenting in ways that do not always work.
These square rooters are invaluable.
They are the source of innovation, improvement and long-term productivity.
Jul 4, 2025 | AI, Leadership
Most marketers wouldn’t know John Boyd if he jumped out of a strategy deck and tackled them. However, his OODA loop brainchild leverages the power of AI to turbocharge tactical marketing effectiveness.
Boyd, a maverick US Air Force fighter pilot and strategist, understood that survival in combat came down to one thing: speed of decision-making. The OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, then rinse and repeat was his insight that gave him the nickname of ’40 second Boyd’ He was never beaten in flight simulator dogfight combat. He understood that whoever cycles through that loop faster reshapes the contest and forces the opponent into reactive mode. In air combat, this meant living. In business, it means winning.
OODA is a mindset. AI is changing the tempo of that mindset in ways even Boyd could not have imagined.
AI can Turbocharge tactical Tempo
Until recently, the bottleneck in decision-making wasn’t data, or insight, or even creativity. It was people. Our slow, deliberate committee meetings, our weekly WIPs, the reviews that drag on longer than a Sydney DA approval.
AI doesn’t suffer these constraints. It observes more, faster. It orients by processing billions of data points in real-time. It proposes decisions with options and probabilities baked in. And it acts immediately when allowed, not months.
What used to be a quarterly campaign development cycle can now happen in an afternoon. And that changes everything.
The limiting factor is the siloed org chart.
The challenge isn’t getting AI to do the work. It already can. The real challenge is getting organisations to leverage the power of speed AI can deliver.
Too many CMOs are caught in the headlights, stuck in outdated governance and fear of missteps. They’re playing the game like it’s 2012. Time as a constraint is rapidly being removed. AI can produce a full marketing program overnight. Then it is handed to the organisational approval processes, often as decisive as my Aunt Mimi.
Meanwhile, your competitor, the one who slashed the approval chain and taught their AI what “on-brand” means, has already launched, learned, and iterated.
Leadership Is the Bottleneck
The real AI revolution is not technical. It’s cultural, and it is leadership.
Speed has become the underrated competitive edge. Not speed for its own sake, but speed to consider, learn, adapt, execute, and then repeat the cycle. This means leaders must rethink their role. They are no longer approval gatekeepers; they act as tempo setters. The conductor of a real-time orchestra where instruments never sleep and tempo changes every hour.
Reclaim the OODA Loop
Every time a decision is delayed, it hands the advantage to the opposition.
In Boyd’s world, if you could stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop, responding to changes faster than they could comprehend, you won.
AI lets us do that not just to competitors, but to markets, media shifts, consumer moods, even cultural trends.
But only if we let it.
As AI becomes embedded in workflows, the question becomes: who trains the AI?
Who owns the “brand brain” that defines tone, style, and judgment?
Smart brands are reclaiming that brain. They are training AI on their own assets and experiences, not renting a brain from their agency. That brain learns, evolves, and becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
Marketing to succeed in this new world must become an adaptive system.
In a world moving at AI speed, Boyd’s old dictum is truer than ever:
Decide fast. Act faster. Or die slow.
If you are not already building your AI-accelerated OODA loop, your competitors are. By the time you notice, they’ll be on to the next loop, and you may be headed for oblivion.
Jun 30, 2025 | Leadership, Management
As a consultant, I am often faced with managing the fragmented attention of my clients. The grass is always greener, and the new shiny thing syndromes are hard at work, particularly in the minds of the stressed owners of an SME, looking hard for an easier way.
Somehow, they must manage their limited resources of time, money, capability, operational capacity, and expertise, insulating themselves against the pull of the siren song of the silver bullet.
There is no substitute for the focussed application of all available resources on a market niche of some sort where there is a competitive advantage that can be defended. The niche may be as local as the best plumber close to your home, or as broad as a revolutionary application of technology to the world market, the logic remains consistent.
The late Charlie Munger had as part of his wardrobe of mental models one he called ‘The circle of competence.’ He credits this idea with much of the success he and Warren Buffett have had in Berkshire Hathaway.
In summary, he assesses all opportunities presented by determining if Berkshire Hathaway has a greater level of competence in the domain within which the opportunity lives than anyone else. The closer to the edge of the circle of competence, the less interesting it is, simply because there are others who know more about the drivers of long-term profitability than he does, and therefore in the long run, he is unlikely to win.
Many years ago, while working for Cerebos, I launched a breakfast cereal into test market in South Australia. It was a bridge between muesli, where Cerebos was a major brand in a small segment with Cerola (now disappeared from shelves) and the standard breakfast cereals, Wheat Bix, corn flakes and rice bubbles. It was a genuinely different product, offering a ‘bridge’ between the ‘tree hugger’ image of muesli, and the sugar laden three products that at that time stood alone in the market.
The launch was extremely successful, at first. Three months after our launch Kelloggs countered with a look-a-like product, ‘Just right’ and blew us away with the weight of advertising, power of the Kelloggs brand, and in store merchandising resources.
While it seemed that our new product, ‘Light and Crunchy’ was a logical and consumer centric expression of the trends in the marketplace, it was a step outside the ‘circle of competence’ of Cerebos. We did not have any competitive advantage in the general cereal market that could be leveraged after Kelloggs rubbed out the modest first mover advantage. It fell right in the middle of the ‘what you think you know’ circle of competence.
We did everything right, the longevity of ‘Just Right’ is evidence of that, but we did not sufficiently understand the drivers of our new competitor, Kelloggs, and the determination they brought to wiping out an interloper in what they saw as ‘their’ market. We were not sufficiently competent to be successful.
That insight came at considerable cost.
Jun 17, 2025 | Change, Leadership
“They snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.”
That phrase echoes around footy grounds when a team, cruising to a win, suddenly collapses. The hunger fades. The cohesion cracks. The urgency evaporates.
Winners who stay winners do so because they never switch off. They stomp on a throat when they have the chance. And when they’re behind, they still believe they can come back.
Sporting analogies make great business metaphors. They’re colourful, visceral, and most of all, familiar.
Skype is a prime example of dropping the ball over the line.
Microsoft has been a cash machine for decades. Dominant, deep-pocketed, and ruthless when it suits. In short, they know how to win. But last month, they quietly walked off the field and took their former champion with them.
Skype was officially euthanised on May 5, 2025.
The original disruptor. The upstart that reinvented digital voice communication. The king of the mountain. Gone.
Skype began in 2003, the brainchild of two Estonians who wanted to reduce the cost of voice calls by using peer-to-peer protocols. The product exploded. eBay snapped it up in 2005 for $2.6 billion. Then in 2011, Microsoft bought it for $8.5 billion. It should have been a match made in heaven.
But inexplicably to me at the time, Microsoft launched Teams in 2017, and from then on, Skype looked like yesterday’s hero. Despite a global user base, a household brand, and a treasure trove of usage data, Skype was left to wither.
Why? Only insiders can say for sure, but from the outside, it looks like the classic case of a team where the halfback and five-eighth couldn’t agree on the game plan. Maybe one group wanted to modernise Skype. Another pushed all-in on Teams. The result? Strategic paralysis.
Then came COVID, and video conferencing exploded. Zoom turned from a quirky tool into a verb, others rushed to grab a piece of the expanding pie, and Skype appeared to be disinterested in even playing.
Microsoft had every advantage: distribution, brand, cash, data, development talent and loyal users by the millions, but they didn’t press the advantage. They coasted, and the game moved on.
So the final whistle has blown. Skype, once the dominant player, was taken off the field not by a better team, but by its own coach.
Small business owners: don’t assume past success guarantees future wins. Stay hungry. Stay alert. Don’t let a lazy midfield cost you the match.
May 1, 2025 | Governance, Leadership
By Sunday morning we will know the outcome of this visionless, spineless, idea and leadership-free zone that has passed for an election campaign.
Whatever the outcome, we can look forward to more of the same. Sadly.
It is unreasonable to compare the governance of a country to that of a major corporation, they are apples and pears. The objectives are so substantially different it’s absurd to pretend they’re the same.
However, at a macro level, there are striking similarities in the systems, structures and disciplines that should underpin both. Many of the principles that drive successful corporate governance are desperately needed in government.
Long-term financial sustainability
Corporations must generate enough cash flow to sustain their operations. Shareholders, lenders, and customers all have options: they can walk if they don’t see value. That pressure forces financial discipline.
Governments by contrast levy taxes to raise their revenue without the taxed having choice. In addition, they can ‘create’ money by borrowing from the central bank via the issuing of government backed bonds. Short term this acts as a cushion for cycles in the economy, but long term, just like a corporation, there must be an ability to both pay the interest and on maturity, retire some of the debt. Failure to do so will result in economic erosion and eventual ‘banana republic’ status.
The long term rules of ‘financial gravity’ apply equally to corporations and governments.
Development and deployment of human and physical assets
Corporations invest in leadership and capability because returns depend on it. Governments have a deeper responsibility. Their role is to shape the society’s capacity to think, build, and adapt. Education is the backbone of economic and social growth. It is more than teaching the necessary practical skills needed by the economy, it is also the intellectual and emotional development of the country. We chase the sugar hit and skip the slow burn by treating education as a cost centre, rather than an investment with a long term payoff in wider ways than just financial. The price of misunderstanding the role of education is paid in wasted potential and stalled progress.
Building strategic moats
Warren Buffett nailed it: build moats or die trying. Moats defend your competitive edge.
In national terms, it’s about sovereign capability. Countries that do not invest in strategic domains: energy, food, defence, Intellectual Capital, lose control of their future. Sovereign capability is leverage, and without it, we drift.
Compounding and patience
Einstein called compounding the most powerful force in the universe. Most companies struggle with it. Governments are even worse.
The three-year electoral cycle kills patience. Most policies are Band-Aids with media-friendly headlines. Real compounding needs time and resolve, both of which require leadership.
A handful of exceptions stand out in our history: floating the dollar, Medicare, GST reform. Rare moments of a recognition that the long-term always arrives, sometimes all of a sudden.
Seeing the trends and riding them
Both corporations and governments need to play the trend game. Spot it, bet on it, build around it.
But here’s the catch: governments should do what companies cannot. They must back the long-term, risky bets that create public good. They must build the infrastructure: physical, intellectual, scientific, and social that will serve future generations. This requires an agile mind that can take in new information, process it and arrive at a different point, then execute a long term pivot. This governance characteristic is totally absent from our politics, where the focus is on predicting and planning an answer to the ‘gotcha’ question at the next press conference.
Transparency and trust
Trust is oxygen. Lose it and nothing else matters. Great organisations know this. They operate with clarity, keep promises, and hold people accountable.
Governments? Far too often, the reverse. Opaque processes, spin over substance, accountability dodged. When transparency dies, trust doesn’t just die with it—it rots.
Has anyone seen a trace of any of these six characteristics in this election campaign?
Anyone?
