Oct 1, 2025 | Marketing, Strategy, Uncategorized
Management attention is an investment.
However, I have never seen a calculation of that investment made without the benefit of hindsight. Considering the return on management attention (ROMA) seems to be a sensible element of investment due diligence.
As a consultant I’m always urging clients to focus their resources, time, money, expertise, operational capacity against a narrow field. This focus of resource is always superior to a generalised approach in winning in the short term.
Nowhere are military metaphors more appropriate then in a competitive commercial environment. Every general knows that to win the battle, he needs overwhelming force in a specific space.
However, every general also knows that a war is not won in a single battle. To win the war, you also must be able to adjust to changes in the context in which the war is being waged and respond accordingly.
Years ago, while working for Cerebos, I was responsible for Cerola muesli, now departed from supermarket shelves. In those days there were only a few major SKUs in the breakfast cereal aisle. Wheat Bix, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Rice bubbles, and a few other relatively minor SKUs. Muesli was out on the fringes, widely seen as ‘tree hugger food’.
As an extension to Cerola, we created a strategy that straddled the gap between those major cereals and muesli and named it ‘Light & Crunchy’.
We launched it into a test in South Australia. We believed we could build the Cerola brand to be more than just ‘hippie-food’ by creating a new category in the Cereal market. There was an unmet need, a potential gap in the market. That gap could be leveraged (we believed) with a good product and effective marketing programs to generate trial, which would lead to repeat purchase.
The early stages of the test were an enormous success. We easily got retail distribution, consumer trial and repurchase rates that were well above our benchmarks for a successful test.
The significant miscalculation made was not anticipating the weight of the response from Kellogg’s.
It came very quickly with a competitive product called ‘Just Right’, a direct copy of Light and Crunchy. Just Right still exists, which validates our identification of the unmet need. Kellogg’s competitive launch was supported by overwhelming advertising, consumer promotions, and instore promotional support. That massive, focused response by Kellogg’s simply blew us away, and killed any thoughts of continuing.
Kellogg’s saw our test launch of Light & Crunchy as a significant incursion into their territory. They had previously left us alone in Muesli. Research indicated that muesli, as it had been, was not competing for the same consumers who were purchasing Corn Flakes, Rice Bubbles, and Sanitarium’s Wheat Bix.
With Cerola Light and Crunchy, we changed that, and Kellogg’s reacted with extreme aggression. I had failed to anticipate the reaction, which was with the benefit of hindsight, absolutely predictable.
The real lesson was that we did not have what it took to be competent in the breakfast cereal market. While competence is a term that most would see as a measure of skill, in this instance it was more than that. It was a measure also of our depth of knowledge of the market, the competitive drivers that existed, and sufficiently deep pockets to wage a competitive war on Kellogg’s home turf.
Our attention was too focussed on the opportunity we saw in the market, but substantially lacking in attention to the wider competitive context. We had a skewed focus of attention, and the return on that lack of attention taught us a painful lesson.
‘ROMA’. Return on Management Attention, is always a strategic driver, rarely adequately considered.
Jul 28, 2025 | Change, Strategy
My time is spent assisting SME’s to improve their performance. This covers their strategic, marketing, and operational performance. Deliberately, I initially try and downplay focus on financial performance as the primary measures, as they are outcomes of a host of other choices made throughout every business.
It is those choices around focus, and resource allocation that need to be examined.
Unfortunately, the financial outcomes are the easiest to measure, so dominate in every business I have ever seen.
When a business is profitable, even if that profit is less that the cost of capital, management is usually locked into current ways of thinking. Even when a business is marginal or even unprofitable, it is hard to drive change in the absence of a real catalyst, such as a creditor threatening to call in the receivers, or a keystone customer going elsewhere.
People are subject to their own experience and biases, and those they see and read about in others.
Convention in a wider context, status quo in their own environment.
Availability bias drives them to put undue weight in the familiar, while dismissing other and especially contrary information.
Confirmation bias makes us unconsciously seek information that confirms what we already believe, while obscuring the contrary.
Between them, these two forces of human psychology cements in the status quo, irrespective of how poor that may be.
Distinguishing between convention and principle is tough, as you need to dismiss these natural biases that exist in all of us. We must reduce everything back to first principles, incredibly hard, as we are not ‘wired’ that way.
The late Daniel Kahneman articulated these problems in his book ‘Thinking fast and Slow’ based on the data he gathered with colleague Amos Tversky in the seventies. This data interrogated the way we make decisions by experimentation, which enables others to quantitively test the conclusions, rather than relying on opinion.
That work opened a whole new field of research we now call ‘Behavioural Economics’ and won Kahneman the Nobel prize. Sadly however, while many have read and understand at a macro level these biases we all feel, it remains challenging to make that key distinction between convention, the way we do it, the way it has always been done, and the underlying principles that should drive the choices we make.
As Richard Feynman put it: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So, you have to be very careful about that.”
Jul 15, 2025 | AI, Strategy
We are so busy debating whether AI will take our jobs, we’ve missed a more dangerous question: what happens when it takes the jobs that create our leaders?
So far, the brunt of automation has fallen on blue-collar roles. Machines took over factory lines, robots handled dangerous or repetitive manual tasks. But the spotlight is shifting. White-collar work, particularly at the entry level, is squarely in the crosshairs of AI. Roles in sales, marketing, law, accounting, admin support, anything process-driven or rule-based are already being swallowed up by bots, templates, and AI agents that never sleep, strike, or slack off.
In past industrial revolutions, we saw enormous upheaval in labour markets. Steam displaced the weavers. Mass production killed off artisans. Electricity reduced manual labour but turbocharged the rise of middle management. Each wave destroyed jobs but also created new ones. That’s the comforting story we tell ourselves.
But this time, the tempo is different. AI is rolling through industries faster than we can repurpose workers. We may eventually find equilibrium, but it’s likely that the rate of job creation will lag the rate of job destruction. And this time, it’s not just jobs on the line, it’s the culture, resilience, and leadership pipelines of entire organizations.
Most of the white-collar roles under threat are entry-level. These are the proving grounds where future leaders learn the ropes, earn their scars, and get spotted by mentors. Strip away those jobs, and what are we left with? A dangerously thin layer of next-gen talent. No feeders. No bench strength. Just a void.
This matters. Organisations depend on a steady flow of energetic, irreverent, risk-taking young guns to shake things up. These outliers challenge orthodoxy, surface new ideas, and eventually rise to reshape the culture. Remove the ground floor, and over time, the whole building becomes brittle.
We don’t yet know the full consequences. But we do have some clues. History is littered with unintended consequences when change is forced onto complex systems.
Consider China’s one-child policy. Designed as a population control measure, it has led to a demographic cliff. Too few young workers. A rapidly aging population. Long-term consequences no one foresaw.
Or nature: rabbits and cane toads introduced to Australia for pest control. Wolves removed from Yellowstone to protect livestock. In each case, the ecosystem was disrupted. Only decades later did we see the cascading damage, and in the case of Yellowstone, the healing when wolves were reintroduced.
The same pattern may emerge in our workplaces. AI may be brilliant at cutting costs and boosting productivity. But if it wipes out the very roles where human potential is first tested and tempered, we could be sowing the seeds of a cultural and leadership vacuum that won’t show up in KPIs until it’s far too late to fix.
May 26, 2025 | AI, Governance, Strategy
Innovation using physics is forging ahead at an accelerating rate.
Remember the speed at which a covid vaccine was brought to the market after the first identification of the virus. Instead of the usual 10 to 15 years we suddenly had that process compressed into 18 months.
And yet there remained those who refused to accept the vaccination for a range of personal and behavioural reasons which many would say are irrational.
Somewhere the line between the technical innovation involved in the hyper-rapid final stage development of the vaccine and the humanities driving behaviour crashed into each other.
As the rate of technical innovation across every domain accelerates it is likely we will continue to stumble across this barrier to adoption, and a fragmentation of adoption across a range of behavioural parameters.
Simply another social tension driven by the speed at which the modern world is evolving. It is way beyond the speed at which our DNA allows behaviour and attitudes to evolve.
The situation in front of us right now is the degree and manner in which AI is accepted and adopted by organisations and by individuals.
We managed this dilemma in the motor industry as it became obvious that it was profoundly important to incorporate safety into the vehicles as a means to save lives. As a result, it became mandatory to design crumple zones into cars, and install seat belts. Regulatory intervention and oversight 60 years after it became obvious that a car could kill its occupants.
Where will the equivalent crumple zone emerge in the arena of AI, and will it be in time?
Apr 24, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Strategy
‘Lean thinking’ is a mindset and toolbox to drive optimisation. Little more, beyond the use of common sense and humanity.
Prominent amongst the tools, and the one I probably use the most is ‘5 why’.
AI has given us an entirely new use case that leverages the insights that a 5 why process when done thoughtfully can deliver.
Prompt development.
There are now hundreds of prompt templates and mnemonics emerging from the woodwork, many claiming to be ‘the one’.
All I have seen use a variation of the Lean ‘5 why’ tool.
Most AI users look at the first output of a prompt into any of the LLM tools, and it is sub-par. Generic recitations of what the trained information base reflects as best practice. The beauty of these data driven assistants is that you can push back as much as you like without them taking it personally.
You can point out areas of failure, misinformation, gobbledy-gook, or imagined fairy tales. You can ask for specifics, deeper analysis, sources, or give it examples. The output then improves with each iteration.
You can also ask it what you might have forgotten to ask, or has been missed for some reason, and ask for suggestions. This interrogation of the tool can reveal things you would not have thought of under normal circumstances.
Go through that process 5 times, and in all likelihood, you will not only have something entirely different to the first response, but it will also be infinitely better, and tailored to the need. You will have cleared away the unnecessary, banal, insignificant, and generic, leaving a response that equates to a first principle response to your evolved prompting.
Continuous improvement by AI driven lean thinking.
What a boon!
Apr 14, 2025 | Change, Communication, Governance, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
When you look you see Hofstadter’s law around you everywhere, every day.
We all understand Murphy’s law, which accurately states that is something can go wrong it will, probably at the worst time. Murphy has a sibling, articulated by Douglas Hofstadter which states: ‘A task always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law’.
Planning is a part of our lives. Some things are easy to plan, the consistent characteristic of these is that there are very few variables over which you do not have control. For example planning a trip to the supermarket, you can check what you need you control the time, the choice of supermarket, where you park, how you work the store, the choices you make between brands. Very few uncontrolled variables.
By contrast strategy is an exercise not just in predicting the future, but then making choices how best to deploy your resources in a way that enables you to shape the future to your benefit by exerting some influence over the range of variables over which you have no control.
Entirely different challenge, as there is never an explicit ‘right’ answer.
When we talk about strategic planning we are effectively mixing two incompatible factors. The uncertainty of the future and the forces over which we have no control, and the certainty of the resources we have to deploy, with uncertain outcomes.
Currently in this country we have a huge black hole called defence planning into which billions of taxpayers dollars are being poured, in the mistaken view that we are able to predict the future and therefore plan as if we could control the variables.
The better way is to have a robust strategy which enables flexibility in the way assets are deployed short term.
Projects tend to expand to fill a time available, while at the same time we habitually underestimate the time that is required to complete any given task, no matter how rigorous we are in the planning.
