Tom SpencerTODAY is the four year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. At the time of its bankruptcy, Lehman Brothers was the fourth largest investment bank in the world. How could it run out of money? And, why did this disrupt the global economy? Lehman Brothers and other investment banks went down in part due […]
SOCIAL VENTURES Australia (SVA) is a relatively new non-profit organisation. Founded in 2002, SVA invests in social change projects to help increase the impact and build the sustainability of high potential organisations in the social sector. SVA currently supports a range of promising organisations including AIME, STREAT, and Teach for Australia. The consulting arm of SVA, aptly […]
Your passion is what stays with us There was a very cautious man, Who never laughed or played. He never risked, he never tried, He never sang or prayed. And when he one day passed away, His insurance was denied. For since he never really lived, They claimed he never died. ~ Anon.
[Last Updated: 31 May 2012] THE list of strategy and general business consulting firms is part of the full list of consulting firms in Australia: Tier One – Global 1. Bain 2. BCG 3. McKinsey Tier One – Australian 4. Nous Group 5. Pacific Strategy Partners 6. Port Jackson Partners Classic – Global 7. Accenture 8. A.T. Kearney 9. Booz […]
Your circumstances may matter less than how you perceive them
Disruptive innovations often beat successful incumbents CLAYTON Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, is an authority on disruptive innovation, a process by which a product or service initially takes root in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors. Christensen gave an insightful talk back in 2009 at the ECS National Forum […]
Applying Philosophy to Business (and vice-versa) This guest post is by a PhD student in philosophy from the Australian National University. DEATH AND TAXES, the adage goes, are life’s two certainties. One might add commerce and philosophy to this list, for the trade of goods and services and the trade of ideas also seem to […]
An explanation of Basel III for non-specialists BNP Paribas Fortis provides a short 10 minute animated presentation on Basel III. For normal people like you and I, this is a nice, accessible and informative summary of how the Basel III framework actually works.
Society has lost its trust in the financial sector. Should we overhaul LIBOR? IN A RECENT article by Bloomberg Businessweek, assistant managing editor Brian Bremmer reports that investigators in America, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the EU are trying to determine whether a handful of brokers and traders have manipulated LIBOR. At this stage, it is […]
Arnold Schwarzenegger provides his 6 secrets to success LISTEN UP.
The unemployment rate tends to understate how many people are actually out of work A PREVIOUS POST looked at the reasons why the reported unemployment rate in the USA tends to understate the “real” unemployment rate. To understand why this happens, here are a few equations which show how the formula for the unemployment rate […]
THIS is a very humorous and instructive (albeit PG rated) overview of economics. Here are the super-summary notes: 1. Microeconomics: The price of sh*t is determined by supply and demand. 2. Macroeconomics: Oh, sh*t! 3. Keynesian economics: Sh*t happens because of animal spirits. 4. Neo-keynesian economics: This sh*t is sticky. 5. Neo-classical synthesis: Sh*t happens in the […]
THE market may be down, but not you. Be bullish about the future. Invest in yourself. And stay hungry. Your stock will rise.
Desire can change from one object to another YOU are most likely familiar with the marketing adage, “Sex sells”. The concept is a fairly simple one. Sex is a topic of interest because humans have a biological and instinctive desire to reproduce. This hard-wired desire is exploited by marketers to attract people’s attention and, at […]
Sometimes all you need is a little nudge ARE you holding off on pursuing a new initiative because you’re in your comfort zone? Do you have a friend whose potential is obvious but they spend all of their time talking big, partying and generally goofing around? Sometimes all you need is the smallest nudge to […]
Steve Jobs narrates the first “Think Different” Apple commercial “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”. It never aired.
Too soon? WHEN someone dies it is cruel to make jokes at their expense immediately thereafter. However, not just any crackpot loony has the ability to single handedly plunge an entire nation into abject poverty. Well done Kim! Kim Jong Il, who passed away today (in case you missed the memo) will be fondly remembered along with other […]
MICHAEL Porter is the thought leader in the field of business strategy. He has single-handedly shaped the way in which the world’s top business leaders think about competitive strategy and success. And his concepts like “competitive advantage”, “value chain” and “five forces” form the bedrock for management thinking about complex business issues. Unfortunately, his frameworks are often bastardised, misused and […]
REMARKABLE products are products that are worth making a remark about. Case in point, the latest version of the NAO humanoid robot. Earlier editions have been sold to researchers for more than $14,600. That being said, I only have one thing to say: “I want one”.
You too can put a ding in the universe THERE are three simple steps to being a visionary leader. That’s it. Just three simple steps. To be a visionary leader, you need to: 1) Learn from everyone, 2) Follow no one, and 3) Look for patterns. So simple and easy to remember. Learn always, never […]
A picture says a thousand words BACK IN 1995, which country had the second highest 10 year government bond yield? As Europe’s third largest economy, Italy is too big to bail out. Past performance is not a predictor or future performance. However, if historical bond yields provide us with any insight about the Europe’s future, […]
Things just escalated LEADERSHIP has been described as the process of social influence in which one person can enlist the aid and support of others in the accomplishment of a common task (Chemers 1997). From a “theory of leadership” perspective, what is interesting about the Occupy Wall Street movement is the absence of any one […]
Recent improvements in the unemployment rate have come from people dropping out of labour force THE unemployment rate in the US has dipped to its lowest level in more than 2 years (source: NYT). Is this good news? Before answering this question, it would help to understand exactly how the US Bureau of Labor Statistics […]
Monkeys learn to use money – what can we learn? ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR of Economics Keith Chen taught a bunch of monkeys to use money. What he discovered was that not only could the monkeys learn to understand the value of money and how to use it, they were also very good at changing their consumption behaviour […]
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it ~ Ferris Bueller THE FRENETIC pace of daily life in Ho Chi Minh City combined with incredible time lapse photography produce a short video that gives you pause for thought (hat tip to Mike Maier for the video). […]
RECENT falls in the officially reported US unemployment rate are an optimistic sign. That said, it is worth remembering that the official US unemployment rate (currently around 9.1%) systematically understates the “real” unemployment rate. This is not a new phenomenon, and occurs because of the particular way in which the US Bureau of Labor Statistics chooses […]
Inflation erodes the value of real currency ECONOMISTS tend to favour a small positive rate of inflation, and there are 4 reasons why this makes sense: Labour market flexibility: inflation allows relative real wages to adjust even if nominal wages do not move. A company that tries to pay workers less money is likely to meet […]
Europe may not go to rehab before it is too late THE US Federal Reserve took steps yesterday to make it easier for European banks to borrow and lend dollars. The Fed is now providing such cheap money to Europe that the European Central Bank can borrow from the Fed at lower interest rates than American banks. The […]
EUROPEAN leaders have tried to characterise the October writedown of Greek debt as “private-sector involvement”. While the writedown would appear to be a default in all but name, efforts to maintain investor confidence have so far been surprisingly successful. Yesterday, US stocks and Asian stocks rallied amid optimism that European leaders are taking steps to […]
THE MARKETS have been temporarily buoyed amid optimism that European leaders will find a solution to the debt crisis. Unfortunately, the optimism is likely to be short lived because the problem with Greece is not just that they owe everyone a lot of money. Greek debt is a symptom of a more endemic problem rooted in the […]
WITH the Occupy Wall Street movement still in full swing, we have to stop and think for a moment about the distribution of wealth in the world. One of the slogans of the Occupy Wall Street movement is “we are the 99%”, which is a reference to the fact that the top 1% of households […]
Whatever you say it is, it isn’t ~ Alfred Korzybski IN OCTOBER 2011, private banks accepted a 50% writedown on Greek debt. European leaders negotiated the writedown to avoid a technical default. It is surprising that ratings agencies did not classify the writedown as a default when you consider that S&P defines sovereign default as […]
ON WEDNESDAY November 23rd, an auction of German government bonds (known as “Bunds”) managed to sell only €3.6 billion out of a total €6 billion worth of Bunds on offer (source: Economist). Germany is one of the most financially stable countries in the Euro-zone, so its failure to sell all of its Bunds is worth […]
THE guesstimate question is a usual type of question that you can expect to be asked when interviewing for a position at a consulting firm. Here is one to test your mettle. The Hospital Bed Question The question is this: How many hospital beds are required in New York city to provide for all of its pregnant […]
IN THE WAKE of the global financial crisis, there has been a backlash against the mainstream school of economic thought, of which Greg Mankiw is a proponent. Mainstream economists did not predict the global financial crisis and notable commentators, including Steve Keen, single out the narrow minded and simplistic ideas put forward by mainstream economists as the […]
Economics is about decision making in situations of scarcity ECONOMICS is the study of how individuals, firms and government make decisions to manage scarce resources. What does this mean exactly? Professor Greg Mankiw teaches economics at Harvard University and is the author of a popular economics text book called Principles of Economics which is used at many Ivy League […]
Creating an app is not that hard, for a 12 year old DO YOU have an app? Well, do you? … Many leading companies have already jumped on the app-store bandwagon (e.g. New York Times, Twitter and Facebook) but most businesses can still confidently answer this question in the negative: “no apps here.” Given that the […]
Which path are you following? TWO ROADS diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better […]
Economies of scope exist where a firm can produce two products at a lower per unit cost than would be possible if it produced only the one ECONOMIES OF SCOPE is an idea that was first explored by John Panzar and Robert Willig in an article published in 1977 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics […]
Trust that the dots will connect down the road, love what you do, and remember that you are going to die TODAY October 5th 2011, we received the sad news that Steve Jobs has departed. We are lucky to have lived during the same age as Steve Jobs, a man who has put a dent in the universe, […]
List of economic consulting firms in Hong Kong AECOM Arup Asia Risk FTI Consulting Gallup GHK Navigant 1. AECOM Website: www.aecom.com Address: AECOM 8/F, Tower 2, Grand Central Plaza, 138 Shatin Rural Committee Road, Shatin, N.T. Hong Kong Tel: +852 3922 9000 Founded in 1990, AECOM is headquartered in Los Angeles and also has offices […]
List of strategy consulting firms in London Accenture Alpha Financial Markets Consulting Alvarez & Marsal Applied Predictive Technologies Applied Value Group Arthur D. Little A.T. Kearney Bain & Company BearingPoint Booz & Company Boston Consulting Group BTS Cambridge Strategic Management Group Candesic Capgemini Cedar Management Consulting Celerant Consulting Deloitte Consulting Frost & Sullivan Global Intelligence […]
To be persuasive your pitch will need to contain the right building blocks EARLIER POSTS looked at the elevator pitch and tips for creating an effective pitch. The elevator pitch, as you may recall, is a high-level overview of whatever it is that you are selling and is designed to just get the conversation started. […]
List of strategy consulting firms in Hong Kong Accenture Alvarez & Marsal Applied Value Group A.T. Kearney Bain & Company Booz & Company Boston Consulting Group Deloitte Consulting Forum Corporation Global Intelligence Alliance Hay Group Hill & Knowlton IMS Health Kurt Salmon Associates Lippincott McKinsey & Company Monitor Group Navigant Consulting OC&C Strategy Consultants Oliver […]
Successful businesses use the Rule of Three to help them drive sales or raise awareness PREVIOUS posts looked at the Rule of Three, how you can improve your speeches with the Rule of Three, and a few amusing examples of where the Rule of Three has been used in comedy, storytelling, and the movies. This post provides […]
“I Can’t Stand to Be Asked the Same Question Three Times” ~ Mustafa Part 1: The Rule of Three Part 2: Improve Your Speech Writing with The Rule of Three Part 3: The Three Question-Rule THE PREVIOUS two parts looked at The Rule of Three and how you can improve your speeches with The Rule of […]
The Rule of Three can make you more persuasive, memorable and entertaining Part 1: The Rule of Three Part 2: Improve Your Speech Writing with The Rule of Three Part 3: The Three Question-Rule EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION is a skill like any other, and the Rule of Three is a simple tool that you can start […]
Omne Trium Perfectum – everything that comes in threes is perfect Part 1: The Rule of Three Part 2: Improve Your Speech Writing with The Rule of Three Part 3: The Three Question Rule OKAY, you may be thinking, what’s so special about the number 3? Good question. The “Rule of Three” is the name […]
THIS IS an important question because the answer will affect how you feel about yourself, how likely you are to persist in the face of set backs, and how much enjoyment you gain from the things you do. If you have read any of Seth Godin‘s work then you are probably familiar with the idea of the “linchpin”; […]
TOMORROW, SEPTEMBER 15th, at various public locations worldwide, people will hand out their own money to complete strangers, two coins or notes at a time, asking the recipients to pass one of these coins or notes on to someone else. The aim is to raise awareness and start conversations about the benefits of economies based […]