I’ve spent over two decades making, influencing, and occasionally getting wrong the kinds of decisions that shape businesses. From structuring deals across ten time zones at a global energy trader, to leading strategy engagements at the top tier management consulting firm, to running a customer health division at one of Australia’s leading health insurers — the thread running through my career has been a fascination with how consequential choices get made, and why they so often go South.
The Story Behind the Book
I had a privilege leading the design, launch, and scale-up of Live Better — Australia’s largest and most integrated health-focused rewards program, with over a million active users, ~30 partner brands, ~3,500 partner locations, and close to $50 million in annualised rewards redemptions.
This program helped transform customer relationships and turn what was a traditional health insurance app into a leading digital health platform with millions of monthly logins. We’ve also digitised and integrated a wide portfolio of telehealth, prevention and homecare services, creating an ecosystem that is accessible and easy to use for millions of customers.
Designing, building and scaling complex programs and integrating services into an ecosystem involves tens of thousands of choices – big and small. Many are intertwined and interdependent. These are the examples of what I call projects with infinite degrees of freedom.
Were all the decisions we made perfect? Some were brilliant. Some I’d rather “undo”. But nonetheless the program was still immensely successful. As I illustrate in the book, organisations don’t need to make every choice perfect. To succeed, it’s often sufficient to make the consequential calls right more often than not.
In my 20+ years of experience, the decisions that mattered most were rarely the big, obvious, board-level calls. They were the ones hiding in the middle of the pyramid — an interpretation of a regulatory clause that threatened a business model, a platform fork that nobody noticed until it was too late, a minor scope omission could have led to a disaster in operations. These experiences, and the scars they left, became the foundation of this book.
I decided to put it all in writing because I kept seeing the same pattern: talented leaders and well-resourced organisations making avoidable mistakes on the most important decisions. Not because they lacked competence or data, but they lacked a clear method for spotting which decisions deserved extreme care, and a discipline for getting those right. The 50:1 Method in this book is my attempt to fix that.
The other promise I made myself was that if I ever write a book, it will be 100% content – 0% filler. 100% beer – 0% froth. I did my best to walk the talk by densely packing it with insights, grounding it in real-world practice, and keeping practical enough to apply on Monday morning. You’ll be the judge of whether I succeeded.