Nov 30, 2009 | Innovation, Leadership, Marketing
The Victorian era threw up some extraordinary characters, amongst them Charles Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym, Lewis Carrol
Here was a man who is best known for a children’s story, one that has deep messages for adults together with the absorbing story for kids, but whose body of work includes hugely creative endeavors in mathematics and photography, as well as writing in all its forms.
Looking for something to use in a seminar on innovation a while ago, I stumbled across a wonderful quotation that encompasses the challenges many find when trying to build an innovation culture in their organisations, and it comes from one of Alice’s conversations with the cat.
“Can you tell me which way I ought to go from here” said Alice
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to” said the cat
” I don’t much care where” said Alice
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you walk” said the cat.
Seems to me to be a great explanation for the necessity of having a plan, with a worthwhile goal as the objective of a journey, and all innovation is after all, just a journey.
Nov 29, 2009 | Change, Innovation, Marketing
Firms are successful when all the elements of strategy development and execution are ‘aligned”, when functional management works in a synergistic manner, and when personal best interests are best served by serving the best interests of the firm.
When this happens, the whole “system” is working in an optimized manner.
The real challenge is to design a new system, one that redraws the rules of the business model, one that creates a new system.
The opportunities that will emerge out of meeting the challenges of climate change are going to be new systems, not a modified version of existing ones. It has always been this way with disruptive innovation.
Shai Agassi has evolved a new system to replace the car. He is testing with the assistance if the Israeli government a system of electric cars with points that replace the batteries, rather than just recharging, but you pay for the miles driven, not to buy and maintain the car.
Familiar?
If you have a mobile phone on some sort of a plan, that is the system that as been adapted by Agassi’s “Better Place” to provide transport, just the way a phone provides communication.
Nov 26, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Small businesses often do not spend the time to develop strategy, agreeing priorities, developing a point of difference, and a plan to execute in the marketplace, and as a result find themselves running harder and harder just to keep up.
Developing a Value Proposition to a defined group of customers is as important to a small business as it is to a large one, perhaps more so as an SME does not normally have the resources to waste on efforts that do offer a return, and they generally have less “fat” in the system to absorb mistakes.
Time spent planning up front always pays dividends in time and resource expenditure down the track.
Nov 25, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Small business
How do you engage with hundreds of people as “friends”?
On a personal level, you may engage deeply with a few, maybe a few dozen, electronically, there may be a group with a specific interest, and you engage with them in a club-type situation, 100 perhaps,150?, but any more and it is not engagement, just some sort of casual interaction, in no way engagement.
The depth of personal relationships simply do not scale.
Our social networking tools have opened new avenues of connection, they are wide, but the width is not a substitute for the depth that can only evolve through a personal connection.
This is one situation where numbers simply do not count, where less is often more, so do not confuse the numbers of contacts with quality of interaction.
Nov 23, 2009 | Innovation, Marketing, Strategy
The evolution of the commercial and legal frameworks within which we live has left us with the notion of the firm as a legal entity, responsible for its debts, its own destiny, and to its owners for a return on the capital risked to fund activities.
In all those capacities, a firm is like a person, but unlike a person, who has an existence as a result of its parents, a firm does not live in the abstract without a value proposition to customers.
Firms grow and prosper only while their products are in some way superior to those of their competitors, and when the products become stale, so do their prospects of success.
This simple fact of life should drive the innovation efforts in all businesses. As the guru Peter Drucker once said, “the only competitive advantage that is sustainable is the ability to out-innovate competitors”
