Sep 30, 2009 | Leadership, Management, Uncategorized
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 the job???.
A colleague of mine is looking for drivers, there should be plenty around in a downturn, but there are very few to whom he chooses to give the keys of his very expensive trucks, carrying perishable loads. When he finds a good one, the price has not gone down, but his costs in finding him have gone way up, as the volume of unsuitable applicants that need to be culled has increased.
Good times or bad, the greatest challenge is finding the right employee, not the cost of the exercise.
Sep 29, 2009 | Management, OE
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 that matrix, some sort of priority list for investment can be developed and implemented.
However, when we started considering the IT risk, we found ourselves confronted by an expanding list of considerations that seemed to grow the more we considered it. The pervasive nature of IT as it has evolved over the last 10 years has changed its risk profile in a profound way.
The boundaries between management functions have been blurred, as have the processes that drive manufacturing, procurement, customer management, and everything else where we routinely now use IT.
Even a simple IT failure is no longer isolated to the immediate functional area impacted by the loss of data, it impacts through the supply chain, and across functional areas in ways we had great difficulty predicting.
The message is simply that IT is sometimes easy to ignore, to treat as an expense, because it us so much part of the environment, but ignoring it is the worst possible outcome, instead, it should be at the front of discussions about investment (financial & human) productivity, process improvement, risk management and competitive advantage.
Sep 28, 2009 | Leadership, Management
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 enough to publicly concede a mistake, and the consequences of the mistake.
Goodwill is like money in the bank, you need to deposit it before you can draw on it, and an apology is a deposit with interest.
Being seen to be big enough to admit a mistake adds greatly to the ammo in the pouch when negotiating or leading, people are far more likely to take your word when they have evidence that you will admit it when you are wrong.
Sep 27, 2009 | Change, Leadership, Management
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 had, a range or bodies regulating and collecting levies for the so-called collective good of the “industry” .
It struck me towards the end of the conversation, which was getting a bit heated, particularly about the recent removal of the single wheat marketing desk, that the positions we were all taking bore the hallmarks of an argument that had happened many times, the various pros & cons recited almost by habit by all concerned.
Whilst they were expressed as considered views, informed by facts, what they really were, on all sides, were recitations of a view expressed many times by rote from within the boundaries of a point of view that was unlikely to change under almost any circumstances.
Next time you find yourself reciting a mantra, go back to the basic facts, consider who benefits, look at the location of margin and profit, and then think about the view you are comfortable with, genuinely informed by the facts.
Sep 24, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing
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 points to the web, so the next best thing is to assemble the conversations at a common point, and give yourself the opportunity to participate.
Brands in public gathers the conversations, and offers a point of intersection between these conversations and the brand owner. At least, you then have a place at the table to counter the nonsense, put forward the facts, and perhaps add a bit of steerage to the process.
Wonderful idea, so obvious with hindsight, executed with simplicity.
