George Negus, who actually isn’t all that fond of being referred to as an aging sex symbol, gave a presentation in Perth at the wonderful venue of the Royal Perth Yacht Club. He was discussing many things and was thoroughly entertaining, and at the conclusion of his speech answered some questions. I had my hand […]
I really enjoyed my early career in direct marketing. One of the things I found interesting was determining which promotional ideas would work and which wouldn’t. The idea was to spend only what was necessary to effectively acquire a customer, and to make the communication as targetted as possible. We’d use promotional giveaways as relevent […]
“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 […]
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 […]
I once had an interesting experience in a meeting with Bill and a top tier consulting firm, in a very impressive office. We called in to see a mid-level manager and explained what we were doing in the consulting arena around ebusiness – strategy, web enabled application development, portals – enhancing the online user experience. […]
It is no surprise that in business the greatest pressure is – of course – on the boss. Whilst staff enjoy up to 14 days per year paid sick leave with 4 weeks annual leave, and cumulative long service leave, the poor business owner who has their house on the line often is unable to […]