Mr Lewis

Tag: thinking

  • see the forrest and the trees

    My catch phrase this week has been “Think like a Marketer, Act like a Salesperson” A colleague went to raise $16M with a cunning plan. Two investors told him his plan was stupid, not cunning, and he pretty much threw his pitch in the bin. Another colleague deployed some new infrastructure, based on market research…

  • Insight on Insight

    Have you ever noticed that Entrepreneurs never put an “Out of Office Message” on their email? John Stokes said this to me whilst we were having lunch at the soon to be demolished Rosati’s in Flinders Lane. John is a British Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist based in Montreal, Canada, where he runs a US$50M fund…

  • Tall & Stupid – Meet the CEO

    The average height of an Australian Male in 1995 was measured at 174.8cm (~ 5ft 9in) by the ABS. I am 174cm (5ft 8in & ½) tall. So imagine my irritation when I met with the CEO of a major (AUD$1B in revenue) Australian organisation who was around 188cm (6ft 2”). He followed me around…

  • The Boogey Man

    One of my relatives occasionally drives me mad with his worrying: How would it look if he failed? What would his wife say? What if he didn’t like it? His worrying almost always to takes the same form. 1.    Identify the worst case outcome (eg usually a combination of bankruptcy/divorce courts/public ridicule). 2.    Don’t explore…

  • Last will and testament.exe

    My wife and I are at the lawyers, going through our will. The previous lawyer had made a number of mistakes, and then promptly left the firm, so it is up to the principal to fix our issues. The Maserati in his carport tells me this guy is either good at his job or good…

  • How I learnt to love bad suppliers

    I got a quote the other day from a computer guy, who emailed: “I will charge you $350 to upgrade your Drupal installation to the latest version.” This was probably the worst quotation I have ever received. (Drupal is an open source content management system that I use in one of my businesses.) So I…

  • Problem Solving Pathways

    The other week I went to hear a speaker talk on leadership in times of crisis. I noticed during the question time that lots of people were asking really good questions, but I didn’t think of my good questions until the next day. Irritating but not unusual. On discussion with a friend, we came to…