Everyone Speaks

If you search ‘best breakfast in Hobart’ on Trip Advisor, you’ll find a tiny, backstreet cafe in the number one spot. This cafe opens for six hours each day, only seats a dozen people and has a queue of eager diners waiting outside before it opens. It’s the kind of place the people who visit…

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Why Not Make Something Great?

Like his grandfather, before him, Shane was in the textiles business. He made good socks for a living until the day he realised that pretty soon there would be no living to be made in a product that was good enough. His company was struggling to differentiate from and compete with big retailers who could…

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The Value Of Subtraction

The call centre operator’s power is limited. He can’t bypass the company’s systems and processes. He is employed to apply a band-aid to the wound—buying the company some time until someone in another department (who he has no direct access to) can solve the problem. He should be empowered to delight and when he’s not…

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Difference By Design

Yesterday I was registering a domain name online when I noticed the company had tweaked the user interface from cart to checkout. Now when you confirm the purchase, the default option is to register for three years, instead of one. The steps to reverse this are not obvious or easy—which I guess means sales are…

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How To Be The Best In The World

LEGO® bricks are the best in the world. Competitors have tried to copy them over the years, but nothing comes close to a real LEGO® brick. So what’s the secret? To make a product that good you’ve got to continually obsess about design and production lines and quality control. But what makes LEGO® the best…

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