Focus on my 4th question

Regularly, I challenge my clients with four questions:

1. What are you doing?
2. What should you be going?
3. What should you not be doing?
4. What should you be doing next?

The fourth is the most important question today, tomorrow, and throughout your career. During the industrial age, the foreman or boss would tell you what to do next. Today, some believe that it is up to their clients to tell them what to do next.

The question deserves your utmost attention, much more than what most people currently assign it. Whether the economy is flying, faltering, or falling there are always opportunities and constraints from which to choose. Your challenge is to select from those opportunities and constraints the option that will provide you with the greatest leverage.

Don’t wait for other people to tell you what to do next. Proactively make your own choices, pick the opportunities you want, and get on with doing what’s next.

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Swan’s accumulated deficits to date: $191.7 billion
Costello’s accumulated surpluses: $97.4 billion

The dashed lines are the 1996 – 2017 averages for Receipts and Payments.

Here is a comparison of the budget balance as reported in the MYEFO in October and the Budget figures from last week.

Tony Abbott

MEN with strong upper body strength are more likely to vote conservatively while physically weaker males have a greater tendency towards left-leaning views.

And stronger men are more likely to protect their resources while weaker males favour more socialist views such as wealth distribution, researchers claim.

Psychological scientists Michael Bang Petersen of Denmark’s Aarhus University, and Daniel Sznycer of the University of California, say political motivations may have evolutionary links to physical strength.

The scientists say men’s upper body strength predicts and influences their political opinions and this link reflects psychological traits that evolved in response to our early ancestral environments and continue to influence behaviour today.

“While many think of politics as a modern phenomenon, it has – in a sense – always been with our species,” they say.

Kevin Rudd with what Larry Pickering calls: “Girl’s hands”

This explains quite a deal, if you wish to believe it.

I personally do not. I consider people like Simon Crean and Kim Beazely to be men of strength and honour.

1. In 2020 there’ll be an estimated 2.5 billion smartphones. What might that tell you about how people will engage with you and your website?
   

   Self-service terminals at KFC Morayfield, Qld

2. My five year-old daughter and her friends have always played with mobile technology (iPhones, iPads, etc.). What might be their instrument of choice as they get older?
3. Cash has all but given way to credit cards. Credit cards will cede to smart phones which will become your wallet.
4. What can you learn from “fast food getting even faster”? Touch screens already popular in Europe are now installed at two busy Queensland outlets, the BP Caboolture North and South stores off the Bruce Highway. McDonald’s says it has moved on from the self-service tills and is preparing to unveil an app that will allow people to order and pay by smartphone.
   

   Interactive virtual store

5. Shopping by smartphone scanning. After successful trials in South Korea, where digital vending machines are now permanently installed in subway stations, Tesco has brought its interactive virtual store concept to the UK so people can order their groceries and be delivered.
6. Consumers will no longer be duped by “sales”, as Sainsbury’s recently discovered with their bogus half-price Breville sandwich maker. Poor customer service will no longer be tolerated, even a little.
7. Become your own mystery shopper. Shop your own business, in person, by telephone, by e-mail. Then fix what you find is wrong, immediately.
   

   Smartphone Virtual Store

8. Before you worry about the latest social media fad, technological development, or selling method; get the basics of your business right. Is your culture, service, offerings, quality, relationships and people the best they should be to attract the clients you most want?
9. Be warned: 90% of your online success is dependent upon your offline behaviours.
10. Even one of the best violin players in the world (Joshua Bell), using a $3.5 million Stradivarius, is ignored when he’s in the wrong setting. Even if the product or service offering is sensational – no one will buy if the environment is not conducive to the buyer.
    

    Joshua Bell playing a $3.5 million Stradivarius in DC subway

11. Some organisations are aware of the really annoying things they do that aggravate customers  and still they continue to do them. Why? Why does MYOB keep utilising telemarketers who never leave messages, and never stop calling? Why do resort sales companies send faxes in spite of constant requests to desist?
12. Smooth the rough edges to your service, relationship and experiences that you no longer notice but annoy the heck out of your customers.
13. Then ask your customers what they want from you, and find a way to give it to them at the appropriate price.
    

    Amazon changes price of oven 9 times in one day

14. Pricing will become more dynamic and fast-moving because of internet shopping.
15. Selling without selling is the future of selling.
16. Man started communicating and telling stories by painting on stone walls and in caves. The Egyptians used hieroglyphics  We now use text. Soon we will prefer to communicate via pictures and video. We’ve come full circle.

Be prepared for what I call: The Hidden Factor. To see what the competition cannot. If you need guidance, a coach, a mentor; join my Private Client’s Program and I’ll help you achieve dramatic business results.

Samuel J sums up the problem: 

Since its first budget in 2008-09, the government has:

- taken policy decisions to increase expenditure by $142.1 billion
- taken policy decisions to increase revenue by $75.1 billion
- mis-forecast (over estimated) revenue by $133.4 billion

This, in a growing economy and with a mining boom:

Net debt is set to peak at $191.6bn in 2014-15 – or 11.4 per cent of gross domestic product, the highest since 1998-99. Gross debt will rise to $282bn by June next year, raising the prospect of a new row over the government being forced to lift the debt ceiling from the current level of $300bn.

Professor Sinclair Davidson isn’t buying the Government’s cries of poor:

How is that sledgehammer to revenue going?

Terry McCrann says the Gillard Government keeps on hoping, keeps on spending:

His two really big hopes are that the domestic economy will grow not just at a sustained clip, but that it will grow evenly. That we will transition smoothly from the resources boom to renewed growth in the non-resources side of the economy.

But at the same time that China will keep on booming, so it keeps buying more of our resources, commodity prices level off and don’t plunge, and as a consequence both company tax and personal tax revenues stay strong.

Despite all his whingeing about tax revenues being shredded, the personal tax take is forecast to leap $14 billion next year and be up $62 billion by 2016-17. While company tax is forecast to go up $6 billion next year and be up $16 billion by 2016-17.

Indeed, total tax revenues by 2016-17 are forecast to be a thumping $105 billion higher than in the 2012-13 year. Yet the Budget only just crawls into the black.

Why? Because spending still goes up $80 billion over those four years. And even that will almost certainly be an UNDER-estimate.

 

Paul Kelly would be right - if there really were enough people dumb enough to believe Labor’s claims of having made realistic savings itself:

The budget enshrines three big agendas over upwards of 10 years and funds them along with a return to surplus – $14bn for DisabilityCare, $24bn on infrastructure and $10bn for Gonski school reforms.

Abbott must decide whether to commit to these Labor agendas or stand and defy. If he commits, he must decide whether to support Labor’s decade-long saving cuts, many of which he detests. If he rejects Labor’s saves, he must produce his own alternative saves. The trap is set.

It is Labor itself that is in Labor’s trap, making massive promises when most voters know the money simply isn’t there.

More from Andrew Bolt …

Only six months ago Prime Minister Julia Gillard was still sure she would end this financial year with a surplus:

We stand by the predictions, the entries in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook. We stand by the figures and we’re on track to deliver a budget surplus.”

Remember, that was just six months ago. Yet now the Treasurer admits the deficit this financial year is actually $19.4 billion.

Somehow, in the space of six months, the Government ended up $20 billion behind what it had thought and what it had promised.

That is an astonishing amount of money. To put it in scale, it is the more than the full costs of the government’s proposed disability scheme and its Gonski changes combined.

How on earth could you make such an astonishing bungle over so short a period, especially with no sudden changes in the world or domestic economy?

That is incredible enough. And utterly damning.

But here’s another curious fact about that figure.

Three weeks ago Gillard said she was receiving $12 billion less in tax revenue than what she’d expected when she got the MYEFO figures back in October:

The “bottom line for the budget bottom line” is this: the amount of tax revenue the Government has collected so far this financial year is already $7.5 billion less than was forecast last October.  Treasury now estimates that this reduction will increase to around $12 billion by the end of the financial year.

So three weeks ago Gillard told us she was down $12 billion on what she expected in October, two weeks before she again promised she’d still deliver the surplus.

Yet the deficit announced yesterday is not $12 billion but $19.4 billion. How did another $7.4 billion go walkies in just three weeks?

The story of this Budget – and the Government’s financial credibility – should begin and end with this single figure: the $19.4 billion deficit that has come from nowhere.

Source: Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun

Oliver Cromwell’s Speech on the Dissolution of the Long Parliament

Given to the House of Commons 
20th April 1653

It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonored by your contempt of all virtue, and defiled by your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government; ye are a pack of mercenary wretches, and would like Esau sell your country for a mess of pottage, and like Judas betray your God for a few pieces of money.

Is there a single virtue now remaining amongst you? Is there one vice you do not possess? Ye have no more religion than my horse; gold is your God; which of you have not barter’d your conscience for bribes? Is there a man amongst you that has the least care for the good of the Commonwealth?

Ye sordid prostitutes have you not defil’d this sacred place, and turn’d the Lord’s temple into a den of thieves, by your immoral principles and wicked practices? Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation; you were deputed here by the people to get grievances redress’d, are yourselves gone!

So! Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors. In the name of God, go!

In recent weeks it’s clear that Google has dismantled Motorola Mobility via assets sales and restructuring. The Motorola Mobility question for Google is timely given a series of events in recent weeks. Consider the following:

• Google sold off Motorola Mobility’s home unit to Arris for $2.35 billion. Google gets out of the set-top box business, but one could argue that unit could have been important to the search giant’s digital living room ambitions.
• The Wall Street Journal reported that Google was struggling to build a so-called X phonethat would compete with Apple’s iPhone. Motorola would create the uber Android handset under Google’s master plan.
• Two of Motorola Mobility’s manufacturing facilities were sold to Flextronics. Google also closed a plant in Chennai. Also see: Flextronics: Moving tech manufacturing to U.S. ‘a journey’
• Motorola’s market share in the U.S. among smartphone subscribers fell to 10.4 percent in November compared to 11.2 percent in August. Motorola’s market share loss was larger than both LG and HTC. In other words, Motorola is taking hits as Apple and Samsung run away with the smartphone market.

Was the Motorola Mobility purchase worth the effort? In many respects, Google’s returns remain to be seen. Google has left much of Motorola’s manufacturing efforts behind. The actual focus of Motorola seems to be unclear. Patents are the big sell here for Google, but the FTC may have taken away some of the search giant’s thunder.

A few of the moving ROI parts:

1. Google’s sale of Motorola’s home division takes 5,000 employees off Google’s books.
2. The sale to Arris, however, removes 29 percent of Motorola’s revenue and 1,000 patents.
3. Motorola’s manufacturing capacity has been curtailed and that should help profit margins.
4. Motorola hasn’t delivered a killer smartphone since being owned by Google.
5. The patent portfolio acquired by Google in the Motorola deal looks like a keeper.

Around the bend

In Australia, there is a federal budget being delivered this week. The struggling government of the day has failed miserably to balance the books. Unfortunately, you DO need to balance your books in your business. You have an obligation to your lenders to meet your repayments. You have an obligation to your staff to pay their wages and entitlements. You have an obligation to your vendors, suppliers, utility services, etc.

Take stock of your position right now. Assess where spending can be cut, or at least reduced, without impacting upon the delivery of service and quality your customers expect from you. Reallocate those funds into growth strategies to take advantage of what’s around the bend. You cannot grow by cutting back. However, by eliminating unnecessary expenditure and reallocating funds to generate growth you will be ahead of the curve.

Now is not the time to put your head in the sand, but to stretch your neck and see past the horizon, and prepare yourself to meet the opportunity that is waiting for you and your organisation.

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“The first sign of a declining civilization is bad manners.”
— Hubert Humphrey