worldview
845 posts
The Measure Of Greatness
I will never forget the first assembly at my children’s school in Australia. Our family had newly migrated to Perth, Western Australia. We wanted to settle our boys as quickly as possible into their new life. So, much to our ten-year-old’s disgust, they were in new schools within two weeks of our ar
The Choice
We know how the trip will pan out even before we get on the tram. The driver is agitated. He uses his bell accordingly. He repeatedly ‘dings’ three times, announcing his tram’s presence on the road. His bell is warning system—reflecting his mood. Everything becomes an emergency. How the driver opera
How To Fill The Gap That’s Yours To Fill
No bookstore can stock more books than Amazon. No local clothing designer can launch a new range faster than Zara. No artisan chocolatier can sell chocolate cheaper than Cadbury. If there’s nothing your bigger, faster, cheaper competitors can’t do, how will your business keep up? How will you surviv
Big Enough
Conventional business wisdom suggests that success is dependent on achieving scale. We’ve come to equate fulfilling our potential with being number one—having the biggest piece of the pie. In our quest for success, we sometimes forget to question how much pie is enough. Exceeding the optimal amount
What The Best Marketers Do
I’m not sure when our attitude to marketing shifted. But it’s likely that it coincided with our ability to buy attention. The price of reaching more eyes and ears on flyers and billboards, radio and TV, seemed cheap compared to the effort of earning customer loyalty day after day. The great marketer
Create The Future You Want To See
The best investment I ever made in myself and my business was buying a copy of Seth Godin’s book, Purple Cow. Seth taught me that remarkability was a choice. Just as business owners don’t work just to pay the bills, writers don’t write just so they can eat. They write to create the change they…
The Best Of Us
Our youngest son got his first paying job at a fast food restaurant this summer. He’d walked up and down the street handing out resumes for days and got a single call back. He was interviewed over the phone and invited in for trial one evening. He got the gig. Twenty dollars an hour and…
Choosing To Be Better
Every business begins with a choice to be better. Not necessarily to be better than the competition, but to be a better option for the people it hopes to serve. As we become mired in the day-to-day work of business building, we can lose sight of our original intention. Nike’s Bill Bowerman chose to
Now Vs. Next
We’ve come to believe that the ability to focus on the future is the cornerstone of achievement, success and progress. But we’re in such a hurry to get there we often sacrifice the opportunity to do our best work in this moment. The irony, of course, is that tomorrow’s success is dependent on the gr
Who Will You Impact?
The bus headed back over the Golden Gate Bridge as we neared the end of our tour of Sausalito. The driver pulled over at the second last stop and turned off the ignition so that he could ‘address his guests’. Then Dwayne Johnson (the man who had the name before the celebrity who made it…
Who Cares?
It’s easy to assume that a delicious meal is about the magic that happens when the chef, who we think has the most skin in the game, directly influences the end product. Is the perfect plate of pasta a result of the quality of the ingredients or the skill of the chef? How much does…
How’s Business?
When Mr Ryan, the Dublin greengrocer, was asked how business was forty years ago he would likely have counted the day’s takings. But that wasn’t his only measure of success. The connection with loyal customers was the lifeblood of his business. Mr Ryan relied on repeat business. His survival depende
What Do Your Customers Thank You For?
As vulnerable humans, we’re brilliant at paying attention to threats in our midst. We are experts at mitigating against failure, which we trick ourselves into believing is the way to optimising for success. This tendency might explain our willingness to devote our resources to averting risk, solving
The Responsive Vs. Reactive Business Conundrum
Every sustainable business was built in response to an unmet need. These responsive businesses endure because they evolve with the customer they intended to serve. The likes of fidget spinner manufacturers don’t count. You can rattle off a dozen responsive companies that have launched in the past tw
You Can’t Mimic Your Way To Success
The Louvre is the most visited art museum in the world. It welcomes more than seven million visitors each year. Six million of those visitors are there to see the world’s most famous work of art, the Mona Lisa. An estimated 16,000 visitors a day jostle in front of the 77 cm x 53 cm…
The Exponential Value Of Being More Human
Everyone was surprised to hear the longer than usual customer service announcement as we were preparing to land in Los Angeles. Many people on board were catching connecting flights to different cities in Australia, and there’s always a little anxiety amongst passengers who are trying to make those
We Are The Culture
Culture is all around us. Our shared values and beliefs are palpable in the places we visit and the people we meet. We absorb those values from the media we consume and the ideas we expose ourselves to. One of the best ways I know to witness how we can shape our culture is to…
A Tale Of Two Managers
My local bank manager, at the branch five minutes walk from my home, works hard to help customers navigate the bank’s new automated systems and services. He’s on hand to show everyone depositing cash how to bypass a teller and make a deposit using the machine in the foyer. The bank manager at the br
How Matters
The woman clearing tables in the Qantas airport lounge is almost invisible to the many preoccupied travellers she cleans up after. People are anxious to charge their devices, grab a bite to eat and catch their flights. The lounge attendant scrapes plates of half-eaten food and piles them on a trolle
The Power Of Scarcity
Demand for anything is always greater when supply is limited. People want what they can’t have, and so scarcity creates value. Scarcity is not just about managing the availability of resources and limiting supply—it can be the foundation of a successful business model. When Howard Schultz expanded S
