Breaking up supermarkets: A really stupid idea.
The pile-on to Coles and Woolworths as protagonists in the 'cost of living crisis' and accusations of gouging, is somewhat akin to the 'burning of witches' in Salem in 1692. (in fact, most of the 16 executed were hanged, but never let a good story get in the...
Neglect to Necessity: Infrastructure is a gift.
In a world dominated by discussions around AI, electrification to 'save the planet’ and its impact on white collar and service jobs, the public seems to miss something fundamental. All this scaling of electrification to replace fossil fuel, power the new...
Great wisdom from a champion.
Roger Federer is the greatest tennis player I have seen in a long life of watching and playing the game. He may have been overtaken by Djokovic as the winner of the most grand slams, which seems to be the public benchmark of the GOAT, but he will remain...
Destructive political fantasy: the break-up of Woolworths and Coles.
The undertaking by Opposition leader Dutton, supported by the Nationals leader Littleproud, to break up the retail gorillas Woolworths and Coles is absurd. It is a gross example of stupid, short term populism and fear mongering that exhibit either utter...
The two separate faces of AI.
AI is the latest new shiny thing in everybody's sightline. It seems to me that AI has two faces, a bit like the Roman God Janus. On one hand we have the large language models or Generatively Pre-trained Transformers, and on the other we have the tools that can...
Commit skin to the game.
Performance is always enhanced when there is skin in the game. I only work with SME's, for the very simple reason that those in charge have skin in the game. The process of creating the environment where significant improvement to financial operational and...
The 74 year journey of AI
We're all familiar with the standard XY graph. It shows us a point on 2 dimensions. AI does a similar thing except that it has millions, and more recently, trillions, of dimensions. Those dimensions are defined by the words we write into the...
A personal reflection on the transferability of culture
Many years ago, I worked for Dairy Farmers Ltd. It was a large dairy co-operative operating in the dying days of milk regulation in NSW. The business had two divisions, reporting at EBIT. The first and biggest by a very large margin was the regulated milk...
The demise of Google, or a new beginning?
80% of Googles revenue comes from advertising. The obvious question is how the explosion of AI after the release of ChatGPT will impact on that revenue, and virtual monopoly of search that delivers it. Rather than typing in a query and getting pages and...
Context before conclusion: Ask more questions.
You cannot expect the right answer to come from the wrong question. Too often we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to answer those questions before we understand the context or the 'frame' from which the answer will come. Before anything else, to ensure...