The South Australian Edition
I’ve spent a week of school holidays with family in Adelaide and my unending pursuit of interesting strategic insights was well fed over there.
Perspective
Without my glasses, I’m legally blind. Yes, really. I thank my dad’s genetics for that. So, uncorrected vision for me looks like this:
This is a painting of the little-known Melbourne-based modernist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, Clarice Beckett. She had an ability to translate swathes of paint into sheets of light, shadow and reflection. Her subject matter was mundane: the streets, cars, footpaths, beaches of Melbourne, but utterly compelling.
The Art Gallery of South Australia has the first large-scale retrospective of her work in a generation and it’s superb. I wondered how Beckett painted at arm’s length, very rapidly (she was known to produce six small works before breakfast), images that only makes sense to the eye viewed at several metres.
Question: How do you work at a detailed level making sure that the bigger picture remains visible?
Playing with the big boys
We got from Melbourne to Adelaide and back for little more than petrol money. Courtesy of new capital-to-capital airline Rex, our fares, both ways, were just over $300 for the three of us.
Rex is at the heart of a major shakeup of domestic flying post-COVID, with a reborn Virgin and a Qantas being challenged on its cash cow (the SYD-MEL corridor, one of the busiest in the world). Qantas is muscling in on Rex’s sweet spot of regional flying, while Rex is now flying between capital cities. Until last month, Rex had only flown a fleet of Saab turbo-prop aircraft; it’s now leased six ex-Virgin 737s.
My observations were that staff, on ground and in the air, were pleasant and efficient and the meal service (on a 50-minute flight) was what you’d expect: pretzels & water. The flight over, with fewer than 30 people on board, had me wondering how quickly they’ll burn through their recent $150m capital injection, but the flight back was gratifyingly full.
I applaud the competition in our airspace and hope they do well. I’ll certainly be flying with them again — in addition to my Qantas flying.
Question: When does it makes sense for you, in business, to elevate to the ‘next level’ and compete with larger players?
Liabilities into assets
Adelaide’s iconic cricket ground was, for most of my life, this bucolic image, with its early 20th-century grandstand and scoreboard standing atop The Hill:
Now, it looks like this, and the Oval Hotel, where we stayed, is built into the eaves of the redeveloped grandstand, which now seats over 50,000. This overhang is otherwise unusable space in a stadium - here it’s been turned into a superb asset.
The restaurant and bar sit high up in the stands with an unparalleled view of the ground, where we could see the Adelaide AFLW team doing night practice ahead of this weekend’s Grand Final. The hotel was good enough to give me the entire restaurant at 6.30 am when I had to lead a (virtual) session for an international conference.
The hotel is naturally booked solidly on event days (especially now the Adelaide Oval is more than a cricket ground) and the quality of the boutique hotel makes it an attractor in itself to a precinct of Adelaide that includes the city centre parklands, the Convention Centre, gallery, and everything within walking, or scootering, distance.
Question: What under-utilised, and overlooked, assets could you turn into productive use?
Do let me know your thoughts on the questions above in the comments. And, click the heart to let me you’ve enjoyed reading this week.
Have a great weekend, and I’ll be with you again next Friday.
Andrew