The start-up’s 3 card cash challenge.
A start-up funded with a cash stake from family, friends, and fools, supplemented by available savings has in its future one of only three options. It runs out of cash before the end of the 'runway'. Crash and burn. It extends the runway by finding more cash,...
How to persuade the unpersuadable
'If you want to change the world, change the metaphor'. Joseph Campbell Every storyteller knows how powerful metaphors are, we all use them to describe to ourselves and others, the complex situations and challenges we face. The tales our parents read us as...
Monopolies, prices and politics produce ugly children!
The dream of every entrepreneur is to have a monopoly, a place where they can set prices without any of those nasty competitive forces impacting on profits. Monopolies are the poison of public policy, it is why we have the many agencies that seek to ensure...
Why does Goliath never beat David?
Goliath, contrary to the stories, usually does win, it is just that we simply never hear about it. There is no drama, no unexpected outcome, no backstory of how little, under resourced David beat the giant who had all the advantages, and got away with the...
AI, a projected case study of its impact.
One of my sons is a radiographer, working in a large public hospital, carrying some management responsibility while still being 'on the tools' in an under-resourced, bureaucratic and highly structured environment. On one hand there is the health system,...
A marketers explanation of how ChatGPT works.
ChatGPT has blasted into our consciousness over the last 2 months. It has created an equal measure of excitement as people see the opportunities for leveraging their capabilities, and dismay at the problems they see being created. Both are right, but if we are to make...
Marketing, Risk management, and Intellectual sex.
We are all familiar with Darwin's theory of natural selection. The forces that drove our evolution drive much of what we do, personally, socially, and professionally. If you apply the idea to the marketing process, where we are dealing with qualitative factors...
2 legal ways to make obscene profits
The first is to have a monopoly, preferably a regulated one, such as a public asset that has been privatised. Sydney's Kingsford Smith airport was flogged off by the government to a private operator who makes obscene profits, not just from the landing...
Why is strategy so messy?
Strategy is an exercise of informed fortune telling. What will happen if we do this? Is that better than if we do that? How will others react, do the ducks really all align the way they seem to? A thousand questions we set out to answer, to allocate our...
5 measures of your supply chain resilience
Our supply chains are suddenly under great scrutiny given the frailties surfaced by Covid. Calls for a greater proportion of domestic procurement are now more common than ever, but is domestic availability the only answer? Most supply chains are actually...