I’ve just finished watching the latest series of Silicon Valley (series 3) on Foxtel. It’s an extremely funny comedy about a tech startup company in Silicon Valley and I recommend that you take a look. In Season 2, the earnest and often-disrespected Jared Dunn proposes that the team undertake a SWOT analysis to help evaluate an important decision. Despite…
Category: Business
Gemütlichkeit as an indicator
I’m currently studying ‘systems thinking’ at university and have been reading the works of one of the most renowned systems thinkers, Donella Meadows. Meadows writes about ‘indicators’ and their importance in all facets of our life. In business, we live and die by ‘key performance indicators’ (KPIs) as a measure of success. But Meadows suggests…
The Crazy Ones – The Leadership vs Management Debate
I like to show the following video, The Crazy Ones, when discussing the distinction between leadership and management. It’s quite an inspiring video, even though I am no Apple fanboy… The people depicted in the video were all ‘leaders’, pioneers in their chosen fields – but what makes them so? Why are they special? Why are…
What is ‘organisational culture’ and why is it so important
One of my favourite quotes comes from management guru Peter Drucker, who once reportedly said: ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’, suggesting that best laid plans have no hope of success in situations where the underlying organisational culture is not aligned to the strategy. ‘Culture’ is extremely powerful, yet it is completely intangible and almost impossible to define….
How ‘agile’ is your organisation?
‘Agile’ is a managerial buzzword that you’ve no doubt heard bandied around in the modern workplace (right up there with my personal favourite: ‘synergy’). You might be aware that ‘agile’ is a formal project management methodology associated with software development, but the fundamental thinking behind that methodology can be applied more broadly to organisations as a whole….
Australian companies doing business in Indonesia: A cross-cultural analysis using Hofstede’s Six Dimensions of National Cultures Model
This was an essay that I submitted for MBA unit ‘Managing in a Global Context’. The assignment was to produce a recommendations report for an Australian business (in this case a fictional one) seeking to enter an overseas market, using academic cultural frameworks (I’ve used Geert Hofstede’s Six Dimensions of National Cultures).
How to brief a digital agency – and why doing it properly is critical
I’ve worked at a couple of places where there has been ‘bad blood’ between the client organisation and their outsourced digital agency. These client-vendor disputes are costly, time-consuming, energy-sapping and just plain bad for business for both organisations involved. Having worked extensively on the client-side, I know that client organisations are inclined to lay the blame firmly at the…
The competitive forces that are laying waste to booksellers
As an online book retailer myself and a lover of books, I was disheartened to see the demise of yet another Australian bookstore chain last week. Adelaide-based specialist university textbook retailer Unibooks, which has been in business for 80 years, will close its doors in 2016, with up to 100 employees set to lose their jobs. Are…