Category Archives: Better Business

Managing by the numbers can lead you into trouble. You need context as well to make the best decisions. Without context, the chances of getting it wrong are high.

Back in the early part of the 20th Century the US railroads – the pre-eminent long-distance transport networks of their day – were offered opportunities to invest in fledgling airlines and automobile manufacturers. They all declined and, in the next few decades, railroads became largely irrelevant to people who wanted to travel long distances acrossContinue reading “Fixing the problem, not the system”

Sometimes – perhaps often, even – the path to maximum profitability is more likely to be by leaving your cost base the same and putting more work into getting the amount of output up for a given level of cost.

Perfection in your performance metrics is good…until it isn’t. How do you know which is which? This article shows you what to look out for.

Most organisations will do almost anything to avoid running at the lowest possible cost. And that’s down to a problem of perspective.

In business, “cutting costs” and “increasing profits” sound like the same thing. But they aren’t.

Being efficient sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? But you can be “too efficient” and cause no end of trouble for your business in the process.

Are you trying to win while using two-dimensional metaphors in a multi-dimensional world? That may not be the best strategy…

Thanks to the world’s determination to make everything about clicks and online tracking “for efficiency” we seem to have spawned more inconvenient and costly solutions than the simpler solutions we had before.

Do you really need more data? Surprisingly often, perhaps, the answer is “no”.