Tuesday Three: 3 ways to improve your business

Focus on the big things, not the little things Focus effort on removing the primary bottleneck in your process. That means stop working on anything that isn’t the current or next bottleneck or business as usual. And I mean everything. This is the secret sauce behind the turnarounds that I and talented small teams have …

Tuesday Three: 3 ways to improve your business

Give the people what they want Go through your Microsoft receipts line by line – and systematically reduce it to zero. Give this task to the palid looking guy who looks after your servers and databases. Abandon PCs – and get Apple Macs for everybody. People will start wanting to come to work again, and …

Want to motorcycle the world? It’s easy

This DVD intro gives a taste for the sort of person that you need to be to ride the world. Assemble your personal excuses, and then watch. (Hint – age and even Parkinsons won’t cut it. Neither will lack of use of a limb, no money, no motorcycle license, gender (ha!), no experience and so …

Let’s make it happen

On Tuesday last week I was lucky enough to listen to an interesting range of cool people give 5 minute talks on the topics of their choice. (ok – only one person hit the 5 minute market exactly, and he had a giant clock on his chest) It was Webstock‘s 3rd birthday and exit from …

Tuesday Three: 3 ways to improve your business

Introducing a series of posts where I’ll be suggesting three simple (or not so simple) ways to improve your business. Here’s the first installment: Reduce the big costs – and the little ones List your major suppliers in descending order of spend, then figure out ways to reduce price and quantity for each of them. …

I’ve joined Equip – a Better by Design consultancy

Better By Design is a NZ Government sponsored program that seeks to help high growth companies become design-led – and thus turn into great companies. The end goal of Better by Design is for New Zealand companies to generate more export sales by selling better-designed products and services. It all came out of a 2003 …

Red Bull is a tobacco company

A scary article in the NZHerald on how a Brooke Robertson lost 55 Kg of weight by abandoning foods and solely drinking Red Bull. “I managed to wean myself off it by being in hospital for that long but I had severe withdrawals – sweating, nausea, shaking. It was an addiction. The doctors stated that.” …

Let’s deliver mail once a week

From this great illustration of the average US Postal Service residential customer’s mailbox we can glean some interesting facts. Amongst them is numerical evidence as to why I don’t check my mail very often. There are almost 200 billion pieces of mail delivered to the (and Wolfram Alpha couldn’t deal with any of this) 111 …

Negative political tactics make you look dull

I admire democracy – after all the alternatives are much worse. I also believe that a robust ‘loyal’ opposition is a necessary part of a healthy democracy. But it all falls apart when an opposition chooses vindictiveness and obstruction over constructive opposition and collaboration. Two recent examples: The US Republican party apparently plans to add …

Spend the $900,000 Telecom – you cheap sods

Sigh. And there I was praising Telecom the other day – praise it seems that was all too soon. I am concerned that recent behavior is indicating that Telecom is back to its old monopolist ways. I write of course of the XT network interference with the Vodafone network. The facts laid out in Vodafone’s …