17 Rules of Game-Changer Thinking: How to Embrace Change and Ignite Your Future

By Allan Bonsall and Phillip Di Bella

Why do some businesses go from strength to strength while other's crash and burn? One reason stands head and shoulders above the rest – a willingness to embrace change that ignites their future and leaves everyone else trailing behind. These are the 'game-changers', the people who grab the opportunity and make it happen. Experience has taught the authors there are rules that must be obeyed if if your ambition is to join the elite group of game-changers. That's what the 17 Rules of Game-Changer Thinking is about, the set of rules that unite today's world of technology and the speed of change with the hard-learned realities of business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allan Bonsall
• Release date: Oct 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781922854834

Book preview

About the Authors

Allan Bonsall

Allan Bonsall has spent his business life helping others shape success. He talks to people nonstop to understand why and how they think, his curiosity driven by a belief that companies must plan from the outside in and see things through the prism of the customer to succeed. His mantra is that without a customer, you don’t have a business, that unless you understand what makes customers tick, a business is doomed to mediocrity.

Allan spent years in the arms of hidden persuaders, leading two of Brisbane’s most successful advertising agencies during the 80s and 90s, applying the power of brand to build trust and connectivity with customers. During this time, he worked alongside many highly motivated and successful game changers: leaders of banks, major retailers, car manufacturers, international hospitality corporates, and entrepreneurs from every known sector of business.

He left the ad business with the ambition of persuading more and more companies to view their operations from an outside-in customer perspective modelled on the lessons learned from some of the nation’s and the world’s most powerful brands. Allan met Phillip Di Bella on this journey, recognising a kindred spirit, albeit from a completely different background and generation. Allan jumped at the chance to join a Di Bella Coffee advisory board, to work with someone destined to become one of the country’s great game changers. Allan wrote the highly successful book Entrepreneurial Intelligence, based on the philosophies he and Phillip shared.

17 Rules of Game-Changer Thinking comes from the same place of shared beliefs, merging the insight Allan has gained over many, many years helping shape companies around the loyalty of customers with Phillip’s entrepreneurial flair and business expertise.

Phillip Di Bella

Phillip Di Bella lives and breathes Gandhi’s philosophy to be part of the change you want to see in the world. He believes we must take control of what we want and what we achieve, that the decisions we make determine the legacy we leave behind. His own legacy is significant.

A highly respected entrepreneur, Phillip’s initial venture, Di Bella Coffee, became Australia’s largest speciality coffee company before he sold it to Retail Food Group for $47 million. His entrepreneurial spirit has also brought success to International Coffee Traders, Abbotsford Road Specialty Coffee in New York, and, recently, The Coffee Commune.

He dedicates time to supporting the growth of others, regularly lending his strategic thinking to major consulting groups, helping their clients overcome challenges and see new opportunities. His commitment to coaching and mentoring continues through The Coffee Commune, which is dedicated to the long-term sustainability and success of the coffee industry.

Phillip’s entrepreneurship has been acknowledged through Entrepreneur of the Year awards, customer-service-awards, and business-owner-awards, and he was listed in the 2006, 2007, and 2009 Business Review Weekly Fast 100. He is an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Griffith University and was the world’s youngest recipient of an Italian knighthood, the ‘Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity’. Phillip has also been twice recognised with the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s Corporate Citizenship Award.

Phillip’s success comes from a belief that every powerful, successful business needs a vision and a plan that cares for its people and the customers they serve. He avidly collects and analyses data before creating a strategy to execute. He studies successes and failures, arguing that you learn more from failure, that copying success risks stifling creativity, and that innovation must thrive for the business to be unique, to be different, and to be better.

First Word

So, you think you’re a game changer, that you’ve got what it takes to create ‘real’ change? Not copy someone else’s ideas, but truly strike out on your own. Make a change that rocks the foundations, turns the establishment in their graves, disrupts the status quo, or confronts the traditional way of doing things and screams out, ‘No more, the future is better than that!’ You think you can do that and, in the process, improve your life, the lives of other Australians, and start that journey to the first million?

‘Yes,’ we hear you say, ‘I know I can, but I’m in the wrong business. I’m not part of this digital-disruption world that’s grabbing all the headlines. I’m not a tech start-up looking to become a unicorn.’

‘But you don’t have to be,’ we start to reply, then stop, all too aware of the headlines that keep on appearing in the media. ‘Ten-fold increase in the number of Australian unicorns’ might be on the front page. A couple of pages later, the story will be about a new technology hub being established in Orange, ‘start-up’ decentralisation following the exodus of data centres from the major cities.

Our frustrated friend’s right; everywhere you turn, the story is about digitalisation, technology, disruption, and unicorns, the magical start-ups that have an estimated capitalised value of over one billion dollars. By 2021, Australia had twenty such companies, up from one in 2019. There are over 500 across the globe, and the number grows daily, although you don’t have to be a unicorn to grab the headlines. A couple built an exercise and healthy living platform that one of the global tech giants snapped up for a cool $400 million. Digital millionaires before the age of twenty-five.

That’s where the glamour and the glory seem to be until you rationalise it and realise that this whole ‘digital start-up’ industry represents only a fraction of the companies that populate the Australian business landscape. Depending on the report you read, technology as an industry is worth about $170 billion to Australia, just under 10% of GDP, but it still trails in the wake of mining and agriculture, probably retailing, maybe tourism and hospitality. Truth is, technology plays a part in every one of those industries, but technology is not the activity that business owners in these industries operate in.

Of course, the whole argument is moot. It doesn’t matter. What matters right now is that this country is on the cusp of the most exciting and challenging period in our economic history, and we need true game changers in every field, in every occupation, in every endeavour if we are to fully realise the potential—people who aren’t content to sit on their hands and watch the world change around them, people who will grab the opportunity and make it happen.

There is no doubting change is inextricably linked to digitalisation and technology. Anyone with the ambition to become a game changer must understand the power of technology and the capacity of technology to facilitate change. But you don’t have to be a start-up techno-whiz to be a game changer. Game-changer thinking is not about digitalisation; game-changer thinking is about innovation and moving on from outmoded and outdated ideas. It’s about reframing the way we think and act; it’s about taking the best of everything we know and becoming smarter, making it better, more efficient, more effective, more valuable, and being prepared to embrace change. Above everything, it’s about understanding the ‘rules’ of game-changer thinking and using them to create wealth.

Much of what will shape us as a country of game changers is already starting to happen, some things faster than others. Covid has taught us that we can’t give up our independence and self-reliance. The economic impact of doing so has been substantial, ramming home the danger of putting all our trade eggs in one basket. We’re seeing the folly of forgoing manufacturing at home in favour of buying cheaper goods from other countries, goods made with Australian iron ore and Australian wool. This is a culture perpetuated by nearly two centuries of reliance on the natural bounty of this country, the wealth that lies buried in our ground and on the backs of the sheep grazing above it. Time and time again, we have created wealth without the onerous need to resort to adding value.

It is a culture that must change if we are to realise our ambition as a nation of game changers.

It is starting to happen. Under Covid, we’ve seen the creativity, inventiveness, and innovation of Australians plug some, but not all, the gaping holes in our manufacturing capacity. Fortunately, and despite the pandemic, our economy remains strong, and our unemployment figures appear to surprise even the most conservative commentators. Overall, it’s a healthier assessment than we perhaps expected, in need of some treatment, without question, but certainly not terminal.

Covid has also thrown our isolation under the spotlight. We are safe, or at least safer than some, but thanks to technology, we are still connected to a rapidly shrinking globe, opening significant opportunities for game changers. Change, and the acceptance of change, must become the new normal. Entire markets have been disrupted; end-to-end supply chains have been rearranged, and our lives have been transformed by a small device we hold in our hands and use to communicate, conduct our banking and our shopping, arrange our social lives, and do all those things and so much more with the minimum of fuss or effort. Except for one fundamental fact: the mobile phone and the internet can’t think for us; they can’t plan.

True change requires a plan, and a plan requires rules. Game changers won’t get to first base without knowing the seventeen rules of game-changer thinking. Amazon did not become the fourth-biggest company in the world (2021) without understanding the rules of change. Apple’s market capitalisation is larger than the GDP of countries like Canada and Australia because Apple used the rules to plan to its advantage. Australia’s own Afterpay didn’t present as a $39 billion takeover target for Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, without following clear rules of engagement and thinking. Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, Facebook, the list is endless. While technology is a critical factor, what truly differentiates these success stories is that every one of them understood that their business would be customer-driven—that customers were central to their business, that change cannot occur unless the value proposition they develop fulfills a ‘customer need’. And understanding how to fulfill that customer need underpins all the rules.

The genesis of change lies with the engine room of our economy, the owners of small and medium-sized enterprises and those people with ambitions to join that powerful club. The immediate challenge facing each of them is how to lead change in their respective industry. That’s what this book is about: analysing and understanding the rules that can turn you into a game changer. Conditions have never been better to turn Australia from a middle-ranking, respected-but-not-kicking-the-big-goals kind of country into one of the most innovative and wealthy countries on the globe.

#1 The Rule of Purpose

The Rule of Purpose must be the beginning. It’s the start, the genesis. No manager or director should make any decisions about their business until they clearly understand what its purpose is. So many people get into business because they’re good at something and see an opportunity, a hole in the market, and jump in. The same people believe their motive for setting up a business should be to make a profit. Both presumptions are wrong and should be avoided at all costs. Anyone setting up in business on the whim of making a fortune is naïve and deceived and most likely doomed to do the exact opposite. Likewise, believing that success lies in perfecting their widget or delivering a more efficient service than some competitors is a con, an idea peddled by people out of touch with reality. To dream for a profit does nothing to make it happen. To spend hours, days, weeks, even months perfecting the widget does not mean it is a better widget or that efficiencies for the sake of efficiencies will be more appealing. To avoid wasted time and accusations of naïvety, the Rule of Purpose must be applied.

For a business to succeed, it must understand and be able to articulate its purpose. But here’s the catch. ‘Purpose’ lies outside the business, not inside. ‘Purpose’ doesn’t exist in the widget or the more efficient service but outside in the marketplace where the customer’s needs and intentions to buy exist. That’s where the journey to understanding ‘purpose’ must start—with the most fundamental of business principles: the need to create customers, because it is the customer who determines what a business is, and it is the customer who will determine what chance that business has of succeeding.

Without a customer, you simply don’t have a business. Without the customer’s intention to purchase, your widgets will gather dust on the shelves—either at your place or at some other expensive part of the inevitable supply chain—or that efficient service will be left lagging behind the one that delivers what