strategy

The 10 Principles of War

By brendan at 7 November, 2011, 11:56 am

Around the start of my career in the late 80′s, Eastern thought was very big in the workplace. There was a growing awareness of Japanese solutions such as Kanban and Keiretsu. Management books such as Miyamoto Musashi’s – The Book of 5 Rings and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War were massively popular as books [...]

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 [...]

Lessons from Disneyland

By brendan at 5 January, 2011, 8:14 pm

Today, I was going to take the kids down to the Water Adventure Park in Geelong, but after realising the forecast for there was 20 C and a spot of rain, we opted for Fun Fields in Whittlesea instead. After promising the kids a theme park, It seemed to be the better “yucky day” option. [...]

wanna get lucky?

By brendan at 29 June, 2010, 8:59 pm

So at a recent Churchill Club function in our Innovation thinking stream, we ran fascinating event Luck. As part of the panel, we brought up a chap called Jason Bresnehan from Tasmania to talk. Jason is a corporate advisor who last year decided to start writing articles about becoming luckier. Jason had started to wonder [...]

Planning for Good Luck

By brendan at 29 June, 2010, 8:27 pm

Every win in my career has been due to hard work and great strategies. Every failure due to bad luck. About 10 years ago I won a million dollar a year support contract. It was due to the sensational sales strategy we had in place. Two years later the business folded due to bad luck [...]

Solutions to problems

By brendan at 12 May, 2010, 9:41 am

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about experience versus wisdom and mentioned different types of solutions. What I was really talking about was solutions from the entrepreneurs point of view. I have found myself discussing this a bit lately, in fact last night I had a meeting with a couple of senior members of [...]

Does Commission Only sales actually work?

By brendan at 3 March, 2010, 9:37 pm

Quite regularly I get offered commission only sales work. Rarely though its ever phrased that way. Normally its a discussion about how exciting and lucrative the opportunity is with a statement at the end like “we don’t pay retainers though”. Instead there is a discussion around “spotters fees”, “trailing revenues”, “your margin” or being “looked [...]

Selling Services for A Fixed Price

By brendan at 3 March, 2010, 12:41 pm

Recently I had a look at Billing Time and Materials for your services. This time around I thought I would have a look at packaging your offering and selling it at a Fixed Price. Packaging up your offering is not for the faint hearted though, you need to think carefully about which of your [...]

What great questions have you got?

By brendan at 22 February, 2010, 8:54 pm

My son, like many children, had his birthday around the cutoff date for entry into Primary school. So my wife and I had a choice “do we send him a little earlier, or a little late. My position on the matter was “Give me one good reason we should hold him back”. And we couldn’t [...]

4 Keys to deploying Social Media

By brendan at 15 December, 2009, 5:51 pm

Last Thursday the Churchill Club ran event on using Social Media for Sponsorship and Fundraising. It was a great evening with perspectives coming from Peter Williams (CEO Deloitte Digital), Jeremy Kann (General Manager, Sales & Commercial at Australian Grand Prix Corporation) and Vicki Kyriakakas (Communications Manager at Environment Victoria). It was quite a wide ranging [...]