Is success in business due to luck or hard work? It used to be that if you worked hard and invested astutely in your business that you could expect to be rewarded. Build it and they will come. Times have changed though, and more and more often it seems that all that hard work goes to waste when an unknown (and previously unseen) competitor emerges from nowhere to steal the market from under your nose. Success has become random with the business environment perpetually unstable and in constant flux. The market is hit-driven rather than being based on careful investment. Success now depends on coming up with the right product at the right time, and having a fairly large dose of luck. Business development used to mean investing in your business and building up the assets under its control. Now it means maximising your business’s luck (or minimising the luck of others).
Continue readingThe new strategic paradigm
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Continue readingSpring craft beer lunch 2012: the best $60 you’ll spend all year
Announcing a 6-course beer lunch at Cookie Beer Hall Oct 13th. After a long lunch and a random conversation, the idea of a match beer & food lunch at Cookie is now a reality. Do yourself a favour and book now by calling venue.
Continue readingThe New Instability for AU$15 the the price of a coffee
If you’re in Melbourne (or possibly the surrounding area) and what to grab a paperback copy of The New Instability? Ping me (there’s a contact […]
Continue readingDynamic pricing and the race to the bottom
I see that online retailers have been admiring the yield management techniques used by airlines and hotels{{1}}. After all, what’s not to like about profit […]
Continue readingMy book, ‘The New Instability’, is finally available
After much effort my book, ‘The New Instability’, has finally found its way through the channel and is now available as a paperback, ePub (iPad, […]
Continue readingAs retail dies, who will be the winners?
The high street is dying. Retailers are struggling to attract customers to their stores. When they do manage to get them in the retailers worry about the same customers using their smartphones to buy a product they’ve just pick up from the shelf from an internet retailer. Retail gurus are telling the high street that they need to make their stores more inviting if they want to continue attracting an ever more fickle public; ensuring that there’s accessible parking for baby boomers who don’t like walking, QR codes on all the products for smartphone wielding Gen Ys, and so. This ignores the fact that globalisation, the internet and mobile phones have fundamentally changed the way we shop. Consumers haven’t just become more fickle, how we go about buying the goods and services we need is in the process of being transformed and any retailer that is little more than the last step in someone else’s supply chain has a poor chance of surviving.
Continue readingYou don’t need a social media strategy
Social media has entered the mainstream and the consultants and gurus are out there telling everyone that they absolutely must have a social media strategy. […]
Continue readingThe future of exchanging value
I had the pleasure, over the last few months, of working with Peter Williams (Centre for the Edge) and Ian Harper (Access Economics) at Deloitte […]
Continue readingWhat is the future of IT in business?
I’ve come to the realisation that there are no good forums for folk trying to understand what new operational models and opportunities the current technological […]
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