Month: September 2020

If you grew up in suburban Australia, you would be familiar with the green and gold trailers regularly appearing on our streets to mow our lawns. Jim’s Mowing has since expanded and the Jim’s Group is now the largest franchise in Australia and New Zealand with some 4,000 franchise owners turning over more than $500m a year serving 35,000 customers a day!

But don’t let the blue-collar grass mowing success story fool you – Dr David Jim Penman, that’s right…Dr, is an avid student of history and how its cyclical nature is determined by biology, epigenetics and character amongst other things.

Buckle up for a wild ride as we explore a huge range of topics including how civilisations are built, how to reverse their decline with epigenetics, why he is fighting the Victorian lockdown laws, and how Jim’s franchises are truly a family.

Arron Wood is not your typical politician. In fact, I’m not sure he’s a politician at all! Granted – he does hold the office of Deputy Lord Mayor for the City of Melbourne, and he is campaigning in next month’s council elections to become the Lord Mayor. But when I came across Arron on social media, it wasn’t via a political ad or a sponsored post. I simply noticed someone who was posting sympathetic, thoughtful, and engaging content, and perhaps most tellingly a majority of that interaction was in replies and comments to other people.

Political messaging is often unidirectional, and getting community leaders to listen and engage in a genuine way is rare but I’m convinced it’s the key to electoral success. It would be no surprise to me then should I be addressing Arron as Mr Mayor at the end of next month. And it’s my pleasure to welcome him to our Series on Business Innovation which explores how business can and will rise from the ashes of COVID-19, and the unprecedented lockdowns around the world.

Today we are going to the gym. My guest Pia Therese is a small business owner in Melbourne, Australia who risked it all and opened a fitness studio called MFW Fitness. Under what is now likely the world’s longest and most severe lockdown, small businesses like MFW have been smashed. And this is despite plenty of evidence that small businesses are not only willing but are capable of opening up in a COVID-Safe way.

Take for example gyms, where we are now learning that they were never a source of COVID transmission, and in fact are better equipped than the government to conduct deep contact tracing because of their detailed and close relationship with their members. This is to say nothing of the fact that COVID-19 is a disease of immunity, like all coronaviruses are, and yet we have seen no messaging from authorities on living a healthy life that encourages a robust immune system.

But It’s not just our bodies we are told to hide inside from this virus, daily messaging from our Premier downplays the incredible and growing mental health harms that result from lockdown rules that increasingly appear arbitrary and not based in science.

I’m hoping this conversation with Pia will give us an insight into what’s really happening with small businesses in Melbourne, and open up a broader conversation on what we all struggle with but don’t admit to anyone – mental health, social media, and the evolving definition of community.

Topher Field demands attention. Not for his own popularity – quite the opposite! In fact, he would rather the spotlight pass him by so he can quietly raise his young family in the suburbs of Melbourne.

But when the world that you are raising those children into appears darker and more authoritarian than the world we grew up in, silence becomes complicity.

For years Topher has warned us that the freedoms we enjoy may have been free to us, but they didn’t come cheap. They were in fact purchased, just not by us. The choices we make today decide whether we keep them or dispose of them.

And that’s why you just can’t look away from Topher. The beautiful thing about this man is that when you dig into him, on the inside is not a doomsday message, but a utopian one. Somehow he remains an optimist and prosecutes the case for hope in forums like his new podcast Living Value.

It was my honour to interview the man, the myth, the legend – to find some clarity around the strange times we are living in.

Damien Silm is an apple farmer in regional NSW who stands to inherit a fortune. I’m not referring to assets, to land or even to the legacy of his great-grandfather who planted those apple trees so many decades ago.

It is clear to me that Damien, as one of the most empathetic people I know, will inherit the future as our world increasingly values empathy in all spheres of life.

Not only does empathy make you a more agreeable person it means that you are more easily able to understand other people’s perspectives. And that can be pressed for a commercial advantage when designing products and services that the market actually wants.

It was refreshing to interview Damien for our series on empathy, as he joined me live from the rolling plains of NSW.