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.

Will a Change in Greens Leadership make the Nationals Redundant?

May 5, 2015

With the moderately surprising news that Christine Milne had decided to step out of her current political life, Dr Richard Di Natale moved into the driver’s seat for the Greens. And I flag that this spells trouble for the National Party because this shift, this change in voice and style, connected to similar passions, will…

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Why most Strategic Plans are little more than wish-lists

Apr 21, 2015

In fact I’ll go one step further and say that many Strategic Plans are DELIBERATE methods for NOT Progressing. In far too many organisations, the process of Strategic Planning is about compliance to a process of ‘having a plan’ and typically it has nothing to do with achievement of the outcomes listed in the Strategic…

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Why Battery Technology will force Power Companies to embrace domestic supply

Mar 11, 2015

Around Australia and parts of the world like the USA, some governments and especially many large scale power utilities, are pursuing a campaign to prevent domestic solar from being fed back into (sold to) the grid. I’m assuming that the (fundamentally flawed) thinking is that by denying additional energy production points, they’ll prop up or…

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Men, What Will Your Legacy Be?

Feb 23, 2015

I’m male. You may like to take that into consideration with the rest of what you read as, a) I’m part of the problem b) Whatever I say cannot, no matter how well intentioned, be in anyway able to represent women     I’m prompted to write this particular piece following on from the ABC’s…

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The Future of Energy

Feb 19, 2015

  On a day when The Age front page ran a story of mass disconnections of householders struggling to pay their domestic electricity bill, Futurist Marcus Barber and ABC Goulburn Murray’s Joseph Thomsen discuss the future of energy – what’s happening now, what are we going to see in the future and what can consumers…

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Eat OR Extract? You CANNOT do Both

Feb 5, 2015

With Farmland across NSW, Queensland, & the Northern Territory under pressure from the mining sector, the quality of discussion as to which land use is of best outcome or most suitable seems to go astray. I’ve been flagging the ‘Eat’ OR ‘Extract’ challenge for a few years now and this radio interview is one example…

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2015 will be the International Year of Battery Technology

Dec 30, 2014

For the past few years I’ve decided to declare each year to be something I think the world needs or is likely to see. It’s not so much about the prediction but more about the likely focus that will benefit the world. So I’m declaring this year to be the International Year of Battery Technology…

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Why Uber is not part of the Sharing Economy

Dec 17, 2014

I keep reading posts that Uber is an example of the ‘sharing economy’, the one in which people freely share what they have with others. But it’s NOT – it is instead part of what I call the ‘Utilisation Economy’ which is about use of spare capacity. About 15 years ago I began writing about…

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Incumbent models are vulnerable to leapfrogging technology. Here’s why:

Nov 8, 2014

One of the reasons I founded The Australian Strategic Planning Institute was to ensure that high quality futures perspectives were included in the Strategic Planning process. Typically they were not which meant too many businesses and organisations were planning for futures that just would not exist as expected, meaning wasted resources and sometimes and marked…

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Down the Drain with a Four Minute Shower – redux

Oct 21, 2014

As Victorian edges its way into a new drought phase and plays catch up to other parts of the country, I’ve been pushed to remember an article I wrote about our then State Government’s push to get people to reduce the length of their showers. The Four Minute Shower was an attempt to highlight just…

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