“You didn’t make that up. I heard that / saw that / wore that 20 years ago….” One of the art directors I used to work with when I was in the advertising industry commented on retro styling. His observation was that new designers would explore new and different concepts for a goodly part of [...]
In a meeting today I was talking with a client who has a particularly dry sense of humour, and a great philosophical perspective on ensuring successful delivery of projects. We were talking about change management. His simple and insightful comment was this: “You have two tools you can use for change management – they are [...]
Today I was trying to explain why organisations sometimes almost compell their managers to do stupid things – or certainly why it might appear that way to people further down the chain. 1. The glance analysis – the solution to someone else’s problem can often seem obvious. That can be due to the person not [...]
I don’t there is a great parallel for business other than when your confidence is up, and you are well prepared, you are unbeatable. Similarly if your confidence is down, you are unwinable. Anyway, Bill Daring calls from the UK. “Bill, so… I don’t follow the cricket, how are your boys doing?” – knowing full [...]
Bill Daring came back to Australia briefly in 2002 and very generously shouted me to a golf game held by the Rugby Business Club of Australia at the Vines Resort. At the game were various sporting celebrities on various holes with the idea that they would also take a shot, and if it was better [...]
When I first went to the UK in 2000 to meet the kmp.co.uk crew, Bill kindly took me for a bit of a tour around the North of England. We visited a “Manor Hoose” (the aristrocratic way of saying house). We went into Manchester and drove around Old Trafford. He said to me, “THIS is [...]
Having discovered your strengths, it is time to think about what your point of difference. In advertising parlance, this is the unique selling proposition – and the difficulty is trying to refine the many things you offer into a simple phrase of about 4 words. A good place to start is thinking about your friends [...]
I was chatting with Bill Wallace about marketing ideas, particularly given he has recently joined a new consulting business, and I wanted to understand what it was all about. More on that later, but one of the many key points that came out of the conversation was that it is really is necessary to pay [...]
One of the things that I found interesting in the way we conducted presentations to clients was Bill’s uncanny nack of teasing out and confronting the hidden issues that someone that he had never met before would open up to him. It really was a case of drawing on a lot of experience. The essence [...]
I once had a meeting with a guy that was supposedly a leader in the whole ebusiness area. He opened the meeting by saying, “I don’t subscribe to that pay the vendor for work model…”. He didn’t particularly articulate how we should get remunerated for what we were doing, but we held our breath and [...]
