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Monthly Archives: September 2009
Finding good employees in a downturn should be easy.
Right? Probably wrong 90% of the time. Superficial logic says when there are lots of people looking for jobs, it should be easy to find one to do yours, this may be true, but is it the right person for … Continue reading
Posted in Leadership, Management, Uncategorized
Tagged Leadership, Management, Operations
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The risk & return of IT
One of my clients is currently undergoing a risk management exercise, pretty ordinary, albeit important stuff. List all the conceivable risks, rate their probability of occurrence, consider the impact if they occurred, and the consider the costs of mitigation. From … Continue reading
Apologies are ammunition
It is unusual for a leader to apologise on their own volition, for anything from a minor misjudgement, to a major fluff-up, but when they do, it gives great assurance to those around that the person is human, and big … Continue reading
Posted in Leadership, Management
Tagged communication, Leadership, managing yourself
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Reconsider the “facts”
A short while ago I found myself in a fairly robust debate about the merits or otherwise of the various industry “marketing & R&D” bodies that have inhabited Australian agriculture for decades. Dairy, meat, Horticulture, grains, all have, or have … Continue reading
Posted in Change, Leadership, Management
Tagged change management, communication, Leadership
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Ahead of the wave.
Seth Godin is once again ahead of the wave with the launch of Brands In Public. The logic is simple, today, you cannot control the conversations that occur about your brand or business, they happen across the myriad of access … Continue reading
Posted in Innovation, Management, Marketing
Tagged Branding, communication, Marketing
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The many brands of branding
Green marketing, Eco marketing, carbon aware marketing, food miles marketing, Cause marketing, all are segments of “marketing” that have potential appeal to an “aware” group of consumers that just a few years ago would have been lumped together, and considered … Continue reading
A picture still tells a thousand words.
Seth Godin a short time ago wrote a post on priorities, goes to the heart of the dilemma we all face, sorting our own version of The priority list . Then Tom Fishburne reflects Seths observations in one picture. What … Continue reading
BHAG or wishful thinking?.
There is a growing trend driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals… BHAG),and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG outcome. Often however, the opposite appears to occur, … Continue reading
Posted in Change, Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
Tagged change management, Innovation, Leadership
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The questionable value of numbers.
Modeling scenarios has become a pretty big business, but notice that you often get only the numbers out of the end of the model, rarely the assumptions that drive the outcomes, and rarely a range of options. This has been … Continue reading
Posted in Management, Marketing, Strategy
Tagged Innovation, Marketing, Operations, Strategy
1 Comment
Status quo defense as a profit detector.
Aggressive defense of the status quo by powerful firms, or a consortia of firms in some sort of industry lobby body often indicates a fat profit plum ripe for the plucking, or a closed shop that protects inefficiency. Perhaps they … Continue reading
Lead from the rear.
Two meetings in two days that demonstrated to me one of the key attributes of a leader. The first, the group shut up until the leader said his piece, making sure everyone in the room knew he had a strongly … Continue reading
The other CV
Most people spend a lot of time polishing their CV’s, particularly whe they are on the lookout for an alternative role. However, how relevent is the paper CV in the age of the cyber-presence? The first thing a prospective employer … Continue reading
Transaction and opportunity costs, 2 sides of the coin.
Transaction costs occur when you do something, opportunity costs, even harder to measure, occur when you do nothing. Transaction costs are well hidden inside the activities that take place in your business, and short of introducing activity costing, are usually … Continue reading
Posted in Change, Innovation, Leadership
Tagged Change, Innovation, Management, Operations
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Moore’s law finds other uses.
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, used a graph 40 years ago to predict the rate of growth in IT capacity by stating his belief that the number of transistors that could be put onto a chip would double every two years. … Continue reading
Posted in Change, Management, Uncategorized
Tagged Change, climate change, Innovation
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Size and intimacy in a demand chain.
Power has shifted dramatically to consumers from the firms that inhabit the supply chains that serve them. Scale used to give market power that could be leveraged, but IT development has radically changed the location of the power towards the … Continue reading
Posted in Demand chains, Management
Tagged change management, demand chain, Value chain
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Innovation, or perhaps” Outovation”
The first syllable of the word “innovation”, describes how most organizations see the process. Look inside the business for better processes, better science, better customer service practices, better product offerings. Problem is, that way you are always seeing the world … Continue reading
React…Respond….. Initiate.
Reacting to something takes little thought, it is easy. Responding to something is harder, it takes thought and usually some resources Initiating is really hard, it requires you to be prepared to be wrong! This is always hard, as it often … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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The new “commons” of the 21st century
Then notion of “industrial commons” as a metaphor for the clustering of firms of a similar type in an area put forward by Gary Pisano of Harvard Business School is immediately attractive, as it easily explains things we have all … Continue reading
Posted in Innovation, Leadership, Marketing, Strategy
Tagged Innovation, Leadership, Strategy
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Some thoughts on negotiation.
Negotiation is a daily activity of most managers, almost irrespective of the size of the organisation, and the industry it sits in. On many occasions, a conversation may not be seen as negotiation, as it lacks the adversarial background that … Continue reading
Posted in Leadership, Management, Sales
Tagged category management, Leadership, negotiation, Sales
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Duck-walking.
If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck, it is probably a duck. How easily some of us can be led to believe that what we are looking at is something other than … Continue reading
Posted in Leadership, Management, Marketing
Tagged communication, Leadership, Management
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StrategyAudit 