Are Planning and critical thinking mutually exclusive?
Metrics increasingly drive our commercial lives. We need the metrics to ensure that we are focused on the outcome, it drives the resource allocation choices that must be made. Usually, we face a series of binary choices, do A or B, then X or Y. This is...
How to build personal Intuition
Intuition is widely misunderstood, often it is seen as a ‘gift’, a rare ability to generate ‘insight’ into a situation. Over my long commercial life, I have come to a different conclusion. Intuition can be generated and managed when it is recognised that it is...
9 ‘Local’ marketing strategies.
Many of my clients are SME’s whose businesses are localised in some way, usually to the boundaries of the city they are in. The budgets they have for marketing are limited, so they must make every dollar count. A very common and deadly mistake they make is to...
A marketers explanation of DIFOT, and its difficult sibling.
When you want to improve something, find a metric that drives the performance you want. Pretty obvious, as most of us subscribe to the cliché that you get what you measure, while remembering Einstein's observation that not all that matters can be measured....
Is Alan Joyce to blame for the Qantas fiasco?
Qantas is at the centre of a political, legal, and social bunfight. On Tuesday 13th, (Sept 2023) Qantas lost an appeal in the High Court, being found guilty of sacking almost 1,700 Qantas workers illegally, replacing them with staff from labour hire businesses....
6 strategies to assist pricing for creativity
Creativity comes from somewhere; the challenge is always to understand and manage the process and the people. This applies equally to every type of creativity, from painting, writing poetry, formulating the mathematical representations of our physical world, to...
The 2 mutually reinforcing ingredients to success:
If there is a magic ingredient to success, it is captured in two words: 'Leverage' and 'Compounding'. We all understand the concept of leverage, using a small amount of force to generate a larger outcome. Compounding is a little more difficult to...
What could be true?
If strategy is all about choice, and I strongly contend that is so, the challenge for responsible management is to imagine first what those choices may be. This ambiguous mindset requiring choices to be made with less than full information never happens...
Can AI be ‘Creative?
Marketers have outsourced creative development to specialists from the beginning of media advertising in the late 1800's. Correctly, there was a realisation that it was a specialist skill, not easily found, nurtured, and leveraged. Amongst the daily advertising...
The biggest challenge for every dreamer who aspires to be an entrepreneur.
Many of the impediments to starting a new business have been removed over the last 20 years. You no longer have to hire an accountant to register the business, hunt around for premises, hire a bookkeeper, find an advertising agency, build a product...