Category Archives: Alliance management

Sporting analogies don’t always work.

Tonight is the first Origin game of 2014, and so  I expect to hear lots of people using sporting analogies  over the next few weeks, particularly football. Sporting analogies abound in business, “A team of champions does not make a … Continue reading

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Value transformation in agriculture

The agricultural supply chain that has dominated the way we get our food has evolved as a fragmented, opaque series of transactions that occur to fill the gap between the producer and the consumer. Many of these transactions add no … Continue reading

Posted in Alliance management, Branding, Marketing, retail, Small business | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The old duck metaphor.

A story on myself. I am in the middle of a small project that requires considerable collaboration amongst people not used to collaborating. Always challenging. In a conversation over the weekend with an old mate, wise in the ways of … Continue reading

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Patents: Tax or Protection?

I was amazed to realise that the recent dog fight to buy Nortel,  was really driven by the patents they had, rather than the value of the operational parts of the business. After an opener bid by Google of $900mill, … Continue reading

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Detailed Specifications and Evolution

An ongoing frustration of innovation projects is the apparently always moving goalposts. How often have you heard “wish marketing would make up their minds what they want” This desire to have the end point articulated at the commencement is natural, … Continue reading

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A seat at the table, or a spot on the menu?

Negotiation is a process of finding a solution to a question that is acceptable to all parties. It should go without saying that the first step is to actually communicate, setting out to find areas of compromise, and places of … Continue reading

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Something old is new again.

It is a bit ironic to think that in the midst of the information revolution that is surrounding us, that we are in some ways reverting to the ways of pre-agricultural humans. Bit of a stretch? Just think, pre-agricultural humans … Continue reading

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New architecture of collaboration

Things have changed, the tools of web 2.0 make collaboration, at least theoretically, really easy, so why it is so hard to get done? Outside the web, where Wikipedia, Linux, Ideo  and a few others have rewritten the rules, and … Continue reading

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The geometry of networks

It is pretty clear to most that the number of connections in a network grows more quickly than the number of people in the network. It is a mathematically consistent relationship captured by Metcalf’s Law, but in summary, you double … Continue reading

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Opposites attract?

Only in physics, in personal relationships we seek common ground, people who under stand instinctively what we are saying and thinking, and who work the way we do. Collaborative teams  and alliances of many types often fail from the start … Continue reading

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Groups need a purpose

It is a pretty simple observation that for a group to act collectively,  there must be a strong central reason for them to do so. The larger the group, the more difficult it becomes to maintain this sense of collaborative … Continue reading

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Conflict within a group Vs conflict between groups

  Somehow, there is an evolutionally phenomenon at work that kicks in when a group gets larger than 150-200, the number that social research has repeatedly identified as the number of people that any individual can have a relationship with, … Continue reading

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Mutuality and network development

  Social networks have boomed, tools to enable the networks abound, MySpace, twitter, face book et al being the most  well known, but many more fail than succeed, and they do so based on the degree of mutuality that exists. … Continue reading

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Collaboration lessons from Canberra

This hung election has generated a tsunami of comment, but nothing I have seen on the mechanics of collaboration, a key factor in any lasting resolution to the impasse  I would have thought. The idea of a “party” is simply … Continue reading

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Social networking as Knowledge management

Knowledge Management is all about collaboration, making the 3 + 3 equal > 6, but the challenge has always been how do you codify the knowledge for dissemination and re-use, implying the existence of both strategy, and a management mechanism … Continue reading

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Manage through people, not contracts.

Contracts are the point of last resort, they define the exit, should it become necessary. Believing a written contract that details how the dynamics of an evolving relationship will be managed is as dumb as believing  the lady in the … Continue reading

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The end, and the beginning?

The momentum of innovation in the auto industry has picked up a notch, as a resurgent Toyota allies with Tesla to re-open the NUMMI plant closed earlier this year to produce a mass market electric car. Toyota got the ball … Continue reading

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The Newtonian paradox of groups.

Successful groups have great power, power to identify, understand the causes and implications of problems and opportunities, and come up with creative responses, and once moving can gather great momentum. Most workplaces are now actively seeking to harness the intellect … Continue reading

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Successful chains are communities

When people are tied together, when they are in “communities” they tend to develop shared values, aspirations, and courses of action. The incidence of double dealing, dishonesty, personal gain at the expense of the community gain, are reduced. An efficient … Continue reading

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“Democtratising knowledge” in demand chains

Democratising  knowledge, isn’t this a lovely term! I have heard it used on a number of occasions recently, and it came up again in an extraordinary TED presentation by Stephen Wolfram . In just two words it nails the complex … Continue reading

Posted in Alliance management, Communication, Demand chains, Social Media, Strategy | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments