Mediocrity is a more widespread problem than poor performance. It’s also much harder to fix. People tend to lower their standards to accept ‘good enough’ as though mediocrity has its own gravity. We temporarily forget that life is too short...
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Three Simple Ideas to Catalyse Industry Action
You often hear industry leaders complain that businesses are too apathetic to engage on industry issues. How is it that some leaders can catalyse industry action and others can’t? My experience is that successful businesses are rarely apathetic....
Are Cybercriminal Business Growing Faster than Tesla?
FBI Director Christopher Wray said recently that the agency was investigating about 100 different types of ransomware, many tracing back to hackers in Russia. Apparently, complaints and reports to the FBI from the private sector show...
A Decade of Value Destruction
Shareholder activists are showing that even the smallest players can wield enormous influence when they call out value destruction. Their strategies and tactics offer powerful insights for industry innovators. We were given a great example this...
Is Your New Boss a Tyrant?
Valuable advice I received when I first started consulting was that too many people leave their corporate jobs to go out on their own, only to discover they now have a tougher boss. It seems that many people are finding themselves in this situation...
Our Surprising Problem with Subtracting
I like to ask overwhelmed executives and organisations what they will stop doing. It is a surprisingly difficult question for people to answer. When asked to ‘subtract’ something from priorities and plans, most people tend to either avoid the...
Three Simple Questions to Help Accelerate Weekly Progress
Business owners know that if sales and profits are not growing, then the business is going backwards. The same holds true for your professional networks and relationships, otherwise career, business or industry plans will stall. It’s pretty...
Is Industry Complexity a Problem?
Complexity and uncertainty can be paralysing for industry organisations and leaders. In fact, it can become an excuse not to act or to just dip a toe in the water. You hear leaders of large industries say how the sheer number of firms...
A Matter of Perspective
Business leaders and industry organisations tend to overestimate the risk and underestimate the potential of innovating. They lose perspective. It’s easy to forget that we’re all living in a thin biosphere 20 kilometres deep on a planet spinning at...
How a Quick Fix Mindset is High Cost
American journalist Henry Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. There is an instinctive appeal for a quick fix. Then later, there is disappointment when the quick fix fails and...