I’m back at school again, this time on the student side, for the first time in 18 years. Day one of the AICD Company Directors Course has just ended, and I’m going to blog my thoughts and take aways each day, so this will be the first of 5 such posts… The CDC course involves 10...Read More
At a recent business cocktail function the WA swimmer Eamon Sullivan was interviewed about his illustrious career, which has included a world championship gold and a bronze, 2 Olympic silvers and bronze, as well as various world records. A major take away for me was his honest self appraisal of his failure to win gold at...Read More
A business owner friend and I were discussing the current business environment this week, and swapping notes on what works (and what does not) when it comes to increasing sales. Assuming the product and services are in demand and provide value to customers, there seem to be two relatively easy ways a business owner/development manager could increase sales … Attend...Read More
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
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
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
