I hear so much talk about what Gen Y is up to ? or not, as the case may be. I hear Gen X and Baby Boomers complain “they don’t know what a hard day’s work is” or “You just wait until they experience an economic downturn then they’ll learn a thing or two.” (No hurry on that one please.) But guess what guys ? Generation Y is busy inventing the future. And quickly. The planet has never been so…
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Great Gift of History.
We live in a digital age ? my mother fears that we will lose this generation of documents and images because we are no longer printing things out. There is simply so much information that digital storage is the only option for us now. I know myself the first digital photographs I took cannot be read by any software application ? and these are only 12 years old. What will it be like when MS office is ancient history (like…
Right time, right place, right attitude
Last night I met a group of 12 prospective members of the Entrepreneurs Organisation. We came together to listen to Peter Kazacos, the inaugural winner of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year award, who sold his business to Telstra three years ago for about $333 million. Since late last year he has been back on his own, looking for a new venture to create. What I took from his talk was that he is living proof that sometimes there are…
Clicking with technology
BlackBerry or crackberry? Some people love them could not run their businesses without them; others think they are a total intrusion. The point is, how do small businesses find out what technology would best suit them. If we believe that true productivity gains are going to come through technology, where are we going to find out what we need? Who can we trust to give us the best advice? We went through a stage of at least once a week…
Time to plan.
I’m in planning today. We are creating the next trimester. This financial year we moved away from quarterly plans to three 4 month planning periods. It has really worked for us. An annual plan is very hard in a fast growing business, but quarters are too short to get really meaty projects complete. No longer are we trying to do a quarterly plan in January. We have hundreds of ideas that we are pulling together into our one page. They…
Creativity is King.
Further to yesterday’s blog about Passionate Pink … here’s the good news. Dan Pink shared with us that apparently Steve Jobs (Founder and CEO of Apple) only looks for two things when he is recruiting people; “I want to know that they can get along with people, and I want to look at their drawing portfolio”. Now I would love that, but this would strike dread into most new recruit’s hearts. Dan had six points to make for organisations to…
Passionate Pink
Dan Pink (author of ‘A Whole New Mind’) took to the stage with gusto on the final day of the n-PODs conference. What a simple message, delivered in an entertaining and enthusiastic way. Here is the crux of the message; “The world is moving from an analytical world to a world driven by creativity and empathy” There are three primary pressures on business as we know it, he explained: Abundance The level of middle class wealth is staggering. In the…
A Moment with Malcolm.
Meeting Malcolm Gladwell in person was quite a different experience to hearing him on stage. Quietly spoken, intense and clearly not so comfortable with endlessly meeting people. He was more like an academic than a journalist. Perhaps he is an academic but what faculty would he belong to? He chose journalism to deeply research and then provide commentary on the social structures. I pondered, did he have any idea that his books would be so phenomenally successful? That the Tipping…
Imagine running a business based on fun - that's what I decided to try when I left a very serious corporate career in marketing to set up RedBalloon...
What people got up to on the day of Love!
We are really quite busy at RedBalloon on Valentine’s Day, not only with voucher deliveries but also in organising wedding proposals. We had some great ones this year. Proposals took place on a Harley, in a hot air balloon, a gondola, at a seaplane picnic, and scuba diving. These are some of the less obvious places people popped the question this year on 14th February. So when I saw these numbers come in I thought it interesting reading. Reed Gift…