Both my parents smoked. Like chimneys. As kids, we’d munch down our morning cornflakes surrounded by last night’s dirty ashtrays. The perfect Christmas present for Dad was a sparkling new ashtray. Little did we know the dangers of smoking. Kind of...
I was a COBOL programmer. Not a very good one, but that didn’t matter in the early 1980s. Back then, every Tuesday’s Australian newspaper featured a twenty-four-page IT section, of which many pages advertised programming and analyst positions available, with most from...
Dear Minister Jones, Congratulations on your appointment as Minister for financial services. I read your early plans with both hope and trepidation about your priority to address the hot mess that is the Australian advice marketplace. I understand the weight behind...
During a pricing workshop last month at the Affinia conference on Hamilton Island (is that place the world capital for golf carts?), an adviser shared a fee problem. An aged care expert in his team could not reconcile charging an advice fee equivalent to the price of...
If you took some time to consider what are the “first things” in your business life, what would be your response? Think about it for a second. I remember attending a lecture by Roger Merrill soon after I started my business in early 1990’s. Merrill...
Marlboro Man was an influential figure last century. He sold a lot of cigarettes. He was the advertising character created by advertising company Leo Burnett in the 1950s to re-launch Marlboro cigarettes for a broader audience. The adverts were conceived to change the...
