National Learning Institute

How powerful are your customers?

Three recent news stories in the Australian media, at first seemingly unrelated, have caught my attention in recent days.

"Norris' pay cut after rate hike fury"
Commonwealth Bank of Australia customers have struck back over the chief executive Ralph Norris's decision last November to push through a super-sized interest rate rise on...

Does your organisation pass the longevity test?

Over recent times, we've seen organisations such as Arthur Anderson, World Com, Enron, Lehman Brothers and many more disappear.  In fact, of the top 25 industrial corporations in the United States in 1900, only two remained on that list at the start of the 1960s, and of the top 25 companies on the Fortune 500 in 1961, only six remain there...

Google and the new management challenge

Lars Rasmussen, the Sydney based co-founder of Google maps has just left Google to join Facebook. Nothing new in that you might say. People leave organisations all the time. However, the reasons given by Rasmussen may suggest some important messages for managers in other ground-breaking companies. They also tend to mirror recent moves by...

To outsource or not to outsource?

Since 2009, two of Australia's biggest trade unions have been outsourcing one of their core business activities – member recruitment – to the private sector. The firm, Work Partners employing 90 recruiters, was paid $500 per new union member recruited. As a headline in The Australian newspaper put it, "Unions employ ultimate in...