We followed on from our innovation cafe a few weeks ago with a brainstorming session last Friday with innovation guru Allan Ryan, founder and Executive Director of the Hargraves Institute.

I think the words “brainstorming session” can be off-putting, implying an unstructured meeting where people throw ideas around in a slightly chaotic fashion. Our session last week was anything but. Allan Ryan is a very skilled facilitator whose approachable style and good humour brings out the best in people.

The one objective from the two-hour session was to come up with an idea for something new that our sales team could sell from January 2010. The twelve people in the session (from departments across the business) wrote down all the ideas they could think of and then had to choose their best idea to briefly describe to the group.

Allan then encouraged us to think of criteria that would ensure the success of the idea. Criteria was written on pieces of A4 and given a letter. We then had to link the criteria and create a kind of ‘map’ on the floor with our pieces of paper. For example, “if we allow our customers to do something different from our content” was linked to ” offer something completely new” which in turn was linked to “create cross-portfolio content bundle”. To help you visualise this here’s a photo:

Our 'map'

Finally we suggested and voted on what the idea for a new service/product had to achieve, for example, something that was easy to sell and easy to buy and that would delight the customer.

The session was a very satisfying experience with a clear objective and a good outcome. We ended up with several excellent ideas and have now selected the one we will implement. It was a great way to include a range of CCH employees, all with very different roles, perspectives and ideas. I think it inspired confidence in people who realised they did have good new product development ideas even if they were not connected to that side of the business.

That was the easy, fun bit. Now we have to implement the idea! More on that in another post.

Kraft knew which way is up when it swiftly withheld the use of the name “iSnack 2.0” for its new and creamier Vegemite variant.  Unfortunately , the web -flavoured name  got the ‘now’ generation  mercilessly miffed, resoundingly rejecting the name.  The  company has now settled on “Vegemite Cheesybite”.

Whether this  snafu  at Vegemite was fact or fake  remains to be seen but it brings back  feelings of deje vu of 1985 when Coca- Cola decided to change its formula and the name of its famous product from ‘Coke’ to ‘New Coke’, only to abandon the shift before the fizz run out.

The lesson from the spread and the fizzy is that if a name has become associated with your products it is suicidal to  dabble with it. It is like exposing your soul to the devil.  You may be left in a hole bigger than your business plan. This is more so in the case of  a variant of the original  product  (as was in the case of ‘iSnack 2.0’). There is a danger that customer perception may be driven to conclude that the original product that created brand awareness and association was second rate all the time. 

Writing in his book ‘Brand failures- The truth about the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time”  Matt Haig says that ‘marketing is a battle of perceptions, not products’.

Perception are ultimately visual  and customers associate brands with their  perceptions of products.  McDonald’s  Golden Arches is  example of  brand association. 

Haig  says this about a well established brand:
“ At the most basic level, your brand is your name. It does not matter how important the brand name is to the company. It is what it means to the public that counts.”

Tax law does not become any spicier than this. In a recent decision by the tax court in the US an experienced tax lawyer ( 78 years old to be exact) has failed in his bid to deduct expenses on prostitutes and pornography on his Federal tax returns. This was despite maintaining records of such expenses as required.  Unsurprisingly he neither had receipts from service providers nor prescriptions from medical practitioners.

The lawyer is reported to have said that he did what he had to do to live. It is interesting to note that the court made a special mention of the fact that the lawyer did not discuss the visits with his doctors afterwards to determine impact of the visits on his health. It is unclear whether this influence the court in rejecting the deductions? It may well be too late to get the medical profession to join in this novel project.

Does it follow that if the earning from an enterprise however shadowy is good enough to be taxed, the clients of the enterprise should be allowed to deduct payments made to that enterprise in the course of carrying on its business?

In Australia, in the case of FC of T v La Rosa 2003 ATC 4510, the Full Federal Court allowed deduction of stolen cash which was intended for purchasing drugs used in illicit drug trading. It was said that the purpose of income tax law was to tax taxable income, not punish wrongdoing. The law was indifferent whether the income, loss or outgoing in question had the source in lawful or unlawful activity. It was further said that punishment of those engaged in unlawful activities was imposed by the criminal law and not by tax laws. Therefore if the income of the business was confiscated under criminal law expenses incurred in running the enterprise would still be deductible and resultant losses could be carried forward.

Pushing the argument further: if an enterprise is good enough for taxation what about the expenses incurred by benefactors of the enterprise? After all funds provided by the benefactors make up the taxable income of the enterprise and the law has no qualms about taxing it.

If only the law makers and the courts saw the merit in the arguments, tax practice would not have a dull moment. Since the lawyer is currently on pension and insolvent, appeal prospects are rather remote.

After working for CCH in various capacities for more years than I care to admit to, I decided late last year that I should do what I really have always wanted to do – study law. Call me crazy but, now well into my second semester, I am really enjoying it. It’s a lot of hard work – I am studying fulltime and working part-time 2 days a week – but finding it enormously intellectually stimulating and fulfilling.

I began my career at CCH in the Editorial department, after graduating with an Arts degree majoring in Australian History, as a production/sub-editor. I later found that I had a technical bent and became part of a project team in the early 1990s to completely revamp our publishing system and move not just the editorial workflow online but also design and develop CD and online versions of our publications. This led me to post-graduate IT studies via distance education, culminating with the completion of a Master of IT degree in 2004. My next move was into operations and project management with CCH’s ediscovery and litigation support division, CCH Workflow Solutions. Finally, having been part of the legal industry for so long, it seemed like the right time to actually get that law degree. Having worked in and around “the law” for over 20 years, I must obviously really like it.

Studying again has not been hard to adjust to, having completed my Masters relatively recently. However, being one of the oldest students, if not the oldest, in most of my classes on campus has been! I sometimes feel like a bit of a leper – “older” people are really to be avoided it seems. As a consequence, us older ones tend to stick together and talk about how young the other students are and reminisce about our experiences when we were undergraduates … and how slack they are not turning up to classes or leaving their assignments to the last minute – not that we were like that at their age, no way!

It is a bit embarrassing at my Constitutional Law tutorial to admit to remembering exactly what I was doing when I heard the Whitlam government had been sacked (on my way to my piano lesson and Mum was glued to the car radio, I even had a “Shame Fraser Shame” badge …). It is hard to know whether the other students are interested in hearing about your life experiences – I tend to hold my tongue rather than risk being branded a bore.

How did anyone study law before the Internet?? The range and extent of online research tools is astounding – journal databases containing every possible academic journal you could ever imagine, case citators linking to judgments going back to the 18th century, commercial research services (like CCH, naturally) providing the most up-to-date commentary, legislation and headnoted case judgments. There really is hardly any reason to actually go into the library, most of what you need is to be found online from the luxury of your own desktop.

Mature age students are notorious for being the ones who have done all the reading in advance of tutorials, hand in their assignments early and badger their lecturers, demanding to know why they only got a D instead of the HD they deserved! My obsession with study has reached the point where, after being semi-woken by my husband this morning to ask if our cat was next to me on the bed I replied that I only had part of her and that really, the Australian Constitution was much more complex than he realised! Sad… a Freudian psychologist would have a field day with that one.

Update - Word just in: Amazon Kindle available in Australia from 19 October.

An error, big or small in  printed word is like an enemy within.  Once the word is pressed to paper it  locks in  all oversights, spelling disasters and rarely and most painfully factual errors. E-books could well be the answer.

When in  my earlier post I dealt with e-books and their future I  did not fully appreciate the widespread menace of errors made by writers, inadvertently of course.  It was reported recently that even J K Rowling is  not  beyond reproach when it comes to creeping errors.  In an article published  in the Economist, Anthony Gottlieb  discusses the merits of e-books in making errors go away in real time.

And where are we in Australia with e-books?

In the Weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review of  September 12, 13, 2009 John Davidson writing under the title “e-read and all about it …. or not” gives a brief account of the progress of e-books in Australia . Although the article does not hold out a lot of promise for the e-book revolution down under in the near future , there are a few points that may be of interest to us at CCH.

In addition to the Amazon.com’s  Kindle and Sony’s Reader (neither of which are available in Australia) there is a lot of hype around Apple’s upcoming Tablet.  On the local front Dymocks currently markets an  e- reader product called “Iliad”. However according to information available , Dymocks sells only 30 Iliads a month (less than 1 percent of its book sales).  The publisher hopes of targeting sales of at least 5 percent in the coming year.

What is the future of e-books?

According to some of the accounts appearing in the international media the going is good, especially in the U.S.  The greatest challenge is not the actual hardware but the issue of managing copyright – known as Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Major players are battling it out over copyright and other issues. The recent dispute between Google and Amazon  is a taste of things to come. Even the US Congress has got  involved.

It is said that almost all books currently available on e-books are copyright dead. This raises the question whether authors will ever be willing to publish their works in e-books format unless a foolproof anti-piracy guarantee  is given .  Efforts are being made  to devise a standard method (EPub)  of  digitally protecting files on e- readers from being copied.  An interesting observation is that if the issue Digital Rights Management is resolved the advent of e-books the second hand book market may be in on hard times. One cannot  e-bay  an e-book without also selling the e-book reader.

The success of professional publications depends almost always on their currency and  e-book technology appears to provide the wherewithal . On the other hand, human preference will be  a major factor in the future of this fledgling e-book  revolution.  Will a tablet sized screen provide the right feel or will the users opt for the quiet environment  of an office with a wide screen and a large top table?