Last week I got the chance to listen to Jerry Hausman, an economics professor from MIT, who spoke on ‘Startups – will their economic models take over?’ – a topic close to my heart. The 70 year old econometrician started by pouring scorn on Twitter (‘I mean, don’t you have something better to do?’) which I...Read More
No one’s listening anymore. Not for long anyway, as in, not for more than a few seconds. In this twitter era of short concentration spans, communication is boiled down to 3 word phrases and little else. You get passing attention. There’s just so much ‘stuff’ going on, flying by on newsfeeds and instachatter. Recent elections around...Read More
The CEO Sleepout last Thursday night was another humbling and thought-provoking experience for me, plus the other 100+ WA CEOs who braved the cold and hard concrete floors of the WACA, armed only with a thin piece of cardboard, a sleeping bag and a pillow. I found the same spot I had used 6 years earlier, and actually...Read More
On Friday I helped out delivering boxes of books to clients. It was a nice change from the desk job, and got me out into 13 offices from across the city, through East Perth, up to Joondalup and back down to Osborne Park and West Perth. There were 9 books to a box (each book a 228 page...Read More
Let us consider the desk of a music teacher. It’s a mess. Scraps of paper. Bits of old instruments. Manuscripts. Old tour programmes. Scrunched up notepad. Yesterday’s lunch remains. A half drunk cup of coffee. A lunky gonk. Some chewed pencils. A Music teacher’s desk is the desk of a creative mind. It’s a buzz,...Read More
There’s nothing quite like a neat, succinct slogan (or natty headline for that matter) that neatly encapsulates a big point into a tasty few words. Businesses strive for this with ‘tag lines’ for the promotional campaigns – ‘don’t cheat on the cheese‘ is one I remember back in the 1980s, being a TV ad for UK...Read More
Things that creep up on you can be the hardest to recognise and defend against. Whether they be imaginary spooks hiding in the dark to frighten you from your slumbers, or people quietly tip toeing up behind you to shout ‘boo!’ in your ear, if you don’t see it coming, it can be unnerving when it’s...Read More
As a team exercise, you are given $10 and told to turn that into as much money as you can in a month. What would you do? I used to give my management and marketing class (Year 10s) this challenge in their first lesson, and see what they would come up with. They’d be given...Read More
I’ve lived through a few recessions in my time. I still remember getting the candles out (yes, really) during the miner’s strike of the early 1970s in England. I was 9. It was fun – as a family we knew when the power cuts were coming to our little town, and when to get the candles...Read More
Some matters are best left to business, others to government. This is what makes a ‘mixed economy’ and defines most democratic nations. The only debate seems to be ‘how much government is good?’ or ‘does this particular thing need to be run by government?’. Private schools sit alongside (sometimes next door to) public schools. So too...Read More
