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 within the first three to five years. Even inside well-resourced large companies the challenges of bringing new … Continue reading Startup, stay in business.
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 which the emerge as adults. Enactus UNSW But that is not my experience of millennials. It was inspiring to meet … Continue reading Inspiring millennials
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 a major structural change to the global economy. Venture capitalist, Steve Schlafman noted in a … Continue reading Trade unions and the jobs free 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 the previous industrial revolution. This has important implications for the future of business. Manufacturing will not die but it … Continue reading The future of business is the future of technology
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 is still visible at every step. It was in north eastern France that I found some family … Continue reading ANZAC 2012
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 years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Many of the verities … Continue reading 2012: Not the end of the world, but perhaps the end of the world as we know it
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 make the goal of the corporation the highest return to shareholders and to … Continue reading Maximizing shareholder value should NOT be the only goal of the corporation
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 the reappearance of growth in the economy is a fool’s faith.” If that is the case in the … Continue reading How do we create and share value in a jobless economy?
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 Crisis Response Team, which is part of Google’s philanthropic activities, and he’ll be talking about this at the next … Continue reading Google’s interesting 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 much more conscious of what I consume and where it comes from. Last week we screened Food … Continue reading Local Food or Less Meat?
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