Lean green motorbike… Viewers shun TV ads… Jim’s Everything… What a leader needs…

Lean green motorbike

It’s a great thing when environmentally friendly gizmos are also easy on the eye. Brammo Motor’s Enertia motorbike ticks both of these boxes and then some.

The Enertia has a top speed of 80kmh and can travel just over 70 kilometres on a charge – perfect for zipping around town, according to Kneeslider.com. The Enertia’s batteries take just three hours to top up, so it’s easy to “fill ‘er up” each evening after work.

Best of all, the Enertia looks cool. Although it works like a scooter, with no clutch and twist-and-go mechanism, it looks much more like a motorbike, a snazzy modern one. At just under 150 kilograms it is also much lighter than the average motorbike, making it an all round easy to use, green and good looking package.

The downside? Well, it ain’t cheap. The deluxe model costs about $A17,500, while the yet-to-be-released standard model is still much more expensive that your average scooter at almost $A14,000. Bring on mass production and price competition.

Viewers shun TV ads

As TV moves online, viewers are checking their email during the ads, forcing advertisers to come up with more interesting and interactive ways to get their attention, reports the Washington Post.

Interactive videos and competitions are a couple of ways that advertisers are keeping attention by making ads that don’t look like ads. Jeep has an interactive video ad, which has a three characters searching for a buried treasure in a Jeep Patriot. The viewer chooses what happens to the characters. A segment of the video played on car enthusiast websites and eventually was given its own website. Other advertisers are making different versions of ads for different demographics.

ABC.com calls promotional breaks in an online show “ad pods” or containers because advertisers can fill them with experiences.

Jim’s everything

Stick to your knitting is not a cliché that Jim Penman from Jim‘s Mowing ever took to heart. His multi-service franchise network has just added permaculture to its offerings.

Jim’s Group is providing training and to existing and prospective franchisees on how they can make a living from permaculture, a system of sustainable agriculture that can be used to grow organic fruit and vegetables in the backyard with little labor.

Jim, who has 2600 franchisees in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK, was inspired to add permaculture because of drought. All you need is rainwater and grey water to make the garden grow, he told the AFR.

What a leader needs

Leaders have the predisposition and capacity to hold two opposing ideas at once, according to Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of management at the University of Toronto. And then without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by coming up with a new one, that contains elements of each but is better than both, he writes in the AFR.

Martin says this trait, not superior strategy or faultless execution, are the defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them.

They:

1. Analyse the causality between factors.
2. Envision the decision architecture – and consider all the elements together, despite the complexity.
3. Achieve resolution by finding the new answer.

Quote of the Day

Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.

– Anita Roddick