One Sock

Latest Articles

The reality of online retail in Australia

By brendan at 3 August, 2011, 9:46 am

Not good enough! I read today that Myer intends to do away with shipping and handling costs for its online store, to stop the leak to internet shopping. Apparently “Commonwealth Bank estimates that Australian consumers spent $9.5 billion online last year, with $4.2 billion going to overseas online retailers and the remaining $5.3 billion paid [...]

Don’t grade students

By brendan at 27 July, 2011, 9:19 am

Can business schools stop giving people marks from A-F or 0-100 please. Just give them pass or fail, so they are prepared for real life. One of the things I completely abhor, is business students fresh out of school with grandiose plans but poor execution combined with a loser attitude. The mindset seems to be [...]

Ignoring your emails

By brendan at 25 July, 2011, 3:48 pm

Everyday I ignore your emails. Everyday I receive around 100 emails to my newsletter mailbox. I sign up for anything that takes my fancy, but mostly around technology, innovation and entrepreneurship, but occasionally around personal interests such as kayaking and food. At the end of the workday, I browse the newsletter mailbox fairly quickly, to [...]

saving your job with data visualisation

By brendan at 15 July, 2011, 10:45 am

Most Churchill Club events start with an idea, something I have noticed that then sits in the back of my head weeks, months or years until I understand how it “fits” as a good event. An example of this is data visualisation, or the way that complexity is being represented as an accessible visual medium. [...]

Bloody Promotional Pens!

By brendan at 11 July, 2011, 9:24 pm

I got given a pack of promotional pens the other day from one of my clients. 50% of them disintegrated on use. I had a friend sit in my lounge last Friday, pull out a promotional pen he had been given a week before to find it had run out of ink. Everybody knows this [...]

the money plan

By brendan at 29 June, 2011, 4:16 pm

I had breakfast the other morning with Scott Kilmartin of Haul. I like talking to Scott about the retail market because he has both heaps of experience, and quality insight. Scott felt that the small independent retailer was absolutely on the wane at the moment and on June 30th a lot of accountants would be [...]

managing successful employees

By brendan at 21 June, 2011, 10:47 am

At the of the day I lay my head down on the pillow and asked my wife “So how’d it go?”. “Great” she said. She’d been having problems with a senior employee who had started refusing to undertake activities he had been doing for the last 9 months, because they weren’t specifically in his “task [...]

Maps to Real Life

By brendan at 16 June, 2011, 3:34 pm

I know a guy that has moved his family to Italy, so his children would grow up with a bit of culture in them. The driver was his increasing belief that his kids were evolving into something he’d like to shoo off his lawn. And no, he’s not of Italian descent and neither’s his wife. [...]

Getting Paid Twice

By brendan at 10 June, 2011, 9:29 am

How do you make $2 profit from every $1 sale? That was the guts of a fabulous speech by Goran Roos last night at the Churchill Club. Its hard to put Goran in a box, but he is a management consultant, entrepreneur, Professor, Chair of the Finnish version of the CSIRO and currently on loan [...]

Localisation

By brendan at 9 June, 2011, 12:24 pm

Twenty one years ago, when I left Perth, I planned to return in two years because that was where my home was. Despite not being born there, I had become an adult in Perth and it was where all my “forever friends” are. You know, the ones you don’t have to speak to for years, [...]