Why You Need to Read ‘Invisible Women’ Now

If you’re involved with setting policy, allocating funding, designing products or services and delivering on them, then one book you simply must have read is the absolutely astounding ‘Invisible Women’ by Caroline Criado Perez.

What Perez has done with this book is ALL OF THE RESEARCH you need to have available to you when you make decisions about your business. It is a jaw dropping piece of work for it lays bare just how badly things can go wrong, when you’re missing crucial data in your workplace, in your design team, in your strategy department.

Women reading the book will probably get angry. Sure you’ll have lived it, but just the extent of the battle in ALL domains of society is covered.

If you’re male, you might find this book confronting for it shows just how much your organisation is probably missing when it comes to making effective and profitable decisions. Trust me, you won’t like what it exposes, the short sightedness of the people you work with (maybe even your own thinking) and how that short sightedness is costing you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars every year. Of course you’ll be concerned about the (now?) obvious social implications, and given the decision bias we all tend to cling to, this book is the starting point for change – just why do ‘we’ ignore this opportunity?

It’s worth the discussion. It’s an eye opener. And like a good family barbecue where the salads have been made, guests invited, house cleaned, meat bought, drinks organised, tables set, kids tendered for, all YOU have to do men, is read it. Like cooking the meat, knowing what’s in the book and acting on it will bring you high praise and huge benefits. Trust me though, the prep work has already been done.

Australia’s 2013 Election – LNP in a Landslide

Sep 6, 2013

Or is it? …Over the past six years, the mainstream media polls have consistently shown the Liberal Party /National Party Coalition as well ahead of the Australian Labor Party. Those polls turned out to be wrong last time around when Tony Abbott failed to get enough of the vote to defeat Julia Gillard. Or should…

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Looks like some Soaps kill off more than Germs!

Aug 19, 2013

In my view ALL futures thinking about ‘big issues’ starts with futures thinking about personal issues. The idea that we take for granted the way our lives operate has for millennia been shown to be a high risk assumption. From the food we eat, to where we live, to products we use (and how we…

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For a Futurist, Focus is a Key Issue

Aug 16, 2013

What you look at, how you look at it and where you find your information are critical elements for developing far more effective strategy.  Futures work is about removing the organisational blinkers to increase awareness of risks and emerging opportunities often through Environmental Scanning (ES).  ES comes in all sorts of guises and the key…

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Innovation has to start somewhere, but where?

Aug 5, 2013

How do you innovate? Where do you innovate? Why do you innovate? How do I start innovating? These and a truckload of other similar questions are often tied to the idea that innovation is the silver bullet or panacea to mediocrity in organisations. And maybe it is. There’s a whole raft of ways in which…

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Preparing for the Upswing & a Change in Direction

Jul 20, 2013

From an organisational perspective it is pretty common for senior managers to spend significant energy considering when to upgrade plant and equipment, be it machinery, vehicles or IT infrastructure. The upgrades can occur on the run (in response to a surge in demand for instance), as a result of necessity (say as a result of…

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Why your Race for Talent should be a ‘Slow’ one

Jul 7, 2013

If you’ve seen me speak before you already know I take a provocative stance when it comes to areas like personnel development, training and recruitment. Clients also know that once we’ve opened the door to thinking differently, they’re guided through some significant ‘of course’ moments in terms of how they approach developing their people and…

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Has The Age Editor called for the wrong resignation

Jun 23, 2013

I flag from the outset that I haven’t been a regular readers of newspapers for almost a decade, only slightly less than my giving up on mainstream TV News shows. As such you should take this with a grain of salt, coming as it does from someone who reads maybe a paper a week and…

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Renewable Energy Technology faces same challenges as new carbon tech – fact or fallacy claims

Jun 16, 2013

In the search for fuels and energy sources that act as a replacement to Oil, there’s much hype and claims that need to be tested. In much the same as claims about carbon capture technology being built onto existing coal fired power stations seem to lack both viability and credibility (in my view), the same…

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A Counter to Doomsayers of Manufacturing in Australia

Jun 3, 2013

Every day people in positions of ‘opinion authority’ make choices about what ‘opinions’ they will offer on a whole array of subjects. And it would be fair to say that over the past five years or so, many of those ‘opinion authorities’ have been significantly negative on Australia’s manufacturing sector. There’s no doubt that the…

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Emerging Consumers: Fact or Fiction?

May 29, 2013

As a futurist spending much of my time assessing emerging developments and their implications across an array of industry sectors, I am frequently asked for a view on ‘consumer trends’. Common questions are ‘what will consumers want in the future?’ ‘Does our product (service) have a place?’ ‘What is driving consumer behaviour?’ ‘How can we…

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