ideas
The biggest hurdle facing most startups is to stay in business long enough to be successful. If they accomplish this then they have the chance to turn into an 'overnight success' after many years of hard work. The numbers are against most new businesses. Many new businesses fail
future
Millennials or Generation Y have been getting a hard time in the media for a while now. They are alleged to be entitled, they don't buy cars (which will apparently destroy the economy), and they are said to be extraordinarily optimistic in spite of the economic circumstances into
future
Background to the jobs free future and trade unions Recently I wrote about the jobs free future, where the traditional model of a job for life is dead and industries that were familiar employers during the twentieth century are significantly reducing their need for labour. The jobs free future represents
future
Recently Rebecca Nash from ABC's The Business asked me to consider the future of business over the next decade. Here's some thoughts from that conversation. The future of business has always been driven by developments in technology, and the digital revolution is of equivalent substance to
ideas
I don't think that many romanticise war too much these days. And there is something very poignant and compelling about seeing the fruits of war. In northern France and Belgium the unimaginable scale of loss wrought upon so many families in the great wars of the twentieth century
future
As we come up to the year 2012 many prognosticators are predicting the end of the world. I suspect that this will not come to pass. But I do think that we are seeing the end of the world as we've come to know it during the latter
ideas
It is interesting to think about this now that we see Occupy Wall Street spreading around the world (even to Occupy Sydney). Back in 1976 Michael Jensen and William Meckling argued that the solution to the principal-agency problem — business leaders advance their own interests not those of shareowners — was to
social innovation
Jeff Jarvis sparked my thinking on this recently with his post on The Jobless Future. As Jeff so bluntly stated: "We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future. Holding out blind hope for the magical appearance of new jobs and
ideas
My buddy Anthony Baxter has been a Googler for a while and has worked on many fascinating projects. But what he's working on now is not just interesting from a technology perspective, it is interesting from a social innovation perspective too. He's working on the Google
social innovation
A while back I did a Live Local Challenge, attempting to consume only food produced within 100 kilometres of my home for a week. You can check out the results and learnings from the process in a series of blog posts from 2009. Since that time I've been
civil society
Over the past several years I have come to think that capitalism as practised in the western world is fundamentally broken. Even before the global financial crisis (GFC) this feeling was strong. But in the aftermath of the GFC my discomfort with modern capitalism has continued to grow. Nothing I
civil society
Last year with the launch of Social Innovation Sydney I was inspired by the idea of rebooting capitalism. I had become depressed about the nature of business in our world today and wanted to do something practical about changing things. Then I went off to Paris for LeWeb 2010 Conference