Jan 29, 2012 | Innovation, Personal Rant, Uncategorized
In the December 2011 quarter, Apple made $13 billion in profits, an extraordinary figure, 3 billion more than the revenue of Google in the quarter. Apple is an innovation machine, making it so is the legacy of Steve Jobs.
However, there is usually a flip side to the stories of huge success, Jobs was not the nicest person around, brilliant, magnetic, but a real genuine article prick, according to his biographer, and the woes of Apple contract manufacturers in China are well known.
But, who has heard of the mineral Tantalum? Apple uses it, as does every other producer of our electronic gadgets.
Talison, a company headquartered in Perth used to mine tantalum in Australia, a mineral extracted from an ore called Coltan, short for Columbite-tantalite, but no longer due to competitive price pressure coming from African supplies. Pity we lost another market.
Coltan is now one of the minerals being mined in West Africa, using primitive tools, and kids paid slave wages, sold so we can have the latest gadget, and the nasties in charge can buy more guns and anti-personnel mines, and fill their Swiss bank accounts.
This blog is usually about marketing, management, and the stuff that hopefully scratches my readers brains to facilitate improvement. However, from time to time, we need to think about the ethical base of what we do.
This almost unknown story of Coltan ore, and its derivatives should be on our agenda.
Dec 23, 2011 | Personal Rant, Uncategorized
An obtuse end of year thought, considering the problems the Government is having with its Green partner in policy.
A convergence of trends, organic, free range, sustainable, all the other adjectives, food is all the rage, why not re-brand those horrid, smelly, carbon producing fossil fuels as organic?
Well, they are aren’t they, formed from trees, nice and green, nurtured by the earth for millennia, how could the good Senator Brown possibly disagree?
The carbon tax, could be renamed a “green tax”, recognising the origins of fossil fuels, only reasonable I think, in fact, it should be a central plank of the new party platform. Hats and whistles please.
Give Julia something to think about over the break, apart from gay marriage and how to deliver the budgie a wedgie for Christmas.
See you next year.
Aug 23, 2011 | Uncategorized
Potentially, quick response (QR) codes will revolutionise mobile marketing.
They offer the opportunity to open URL links easily from mobile devices, enabling content to be accessed easily on the move.
This link to the new marketing program for Central Park in New York says it all, and is a great example of the flexability and creativity that QR codes offer, on top of the simple, relatively everyday things like recieving a boarding pass on your phone. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OCyfV_k2_g
Jan 11, 2011 | Management, Uncategorized
A great irony amongst the many I see, is that the skills required to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognise what a right answer looks like.
Put another way, our incompetence in a field masks our ability to recognise our own incompetence.
This irony has been observed by many, Charles Darwin and Bertrand Russell amongst others, but was systematically investigated by two Cornell University psychologists, and has become known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect“. The obvious corollary is that knowing what you do not know is usually a sign of intelligence.
Dunning and Kruger demonstrated this effect is as prevalent amongst educated people as it is amongst those with seemingly less training that may enable them to see their own weaknesses.
In today’s connected and service oriented developed world, this effect when combined with a slick presentation, and loads of self confidence can be a real trap for the unwary, just look at those sprouting financial and stock market certainties just before the GFC hit.
So, next time you hear or see someone sprouting stuff you do not understand, no matter how slick it may appear, make sure you rectify that lack of understanding before you put your hand in your wallet, alternatively, get the hell out of Dodge.
Jul 27, 2010 | Social Media, Uncategorized
I wonder why, when no army since Alexander has managed to retain control over what is now Afghanistan, that the US and it “Allies” including Australia think they can.
The leaks over the weekend on Wikileaks, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/world/asia/26warlogs.html?_r=1 puts a lot of “texture” in relation to the effort into the public domain, and I wonder why we are there.
I know the “nip terrorism in the bud” argument, and it has validity, but I cannot understand why we do not simply napalm every poppy field in the joint. When police aeroplanes in NSW can pick up a few “pot” plants g rowing in State forests, it would be simple to remove the Taliban’s source of money. If they are forced to conduct the war by throwing stones, it would cut down the death toll of soldiers sent to the place, and would have to make the process of bringing some sort of order such that average people could lead their lives in relative security easier.
Apr 24, 2010 | Innovation, Uncategorized
Another of the management paradoxes littered through this blog , and this one is counter to almost everything I have ever written.
In the context of true innovation, listening to customers exclusively leads you to adjusting, improving, repackaging what you currently have.
Real innovation is about inventing the future, and you cannot do it just by playing with the present.
The following challenge is if you are smart enough to invent the future you also have to be smart enough to recognize it when you see it.
Kodak did not see digital photography, but they invented it, IBM struggled to see that the PC would take over from big box computing, Microsoft did not see the web, until it had almost passed them, but Steve Jobs did see touch as the replacement for the mouse, which he originally saw as the devise to democratize personal computers.
