Jun 30, 2010 | Leadership, Management, OE, Operations
Many businesses offer cash for suggestions, put a suggestion box near the canteen, and wonder why most of the suggestions are physically impossible, morally debatable, and often both.
In the end, successful suggestion programs offer the reward of personal satisfaction and recognition to those making them, any financial incentive is usually secondary. The $50 in the paypacket for a successful suggestion is nice, usually appreciated, but not the reason the suggestion was made.
People who are members of a “community” and a workplace is a community, normally want to contribute to that community, unless it is dysfunctional in some fundamental way, and those contributions build connections and mutual obligations, that are the glue of any community.
Many suggestions will be worthless, but offering recognition and feedback to all offerings creates a sense of personal connection. Create that, and the suggestions will increase in value progressively, and ultimately, very few will have anything to do with deviant behavior, and you will quickly be able to do away with the anonymous box, and have the feedback directly, person to person.
Jun 29, 2010 | Change, Leadership, Personal Rant
Despite the optimistic nonsense coming out of the Government in Canberra, and the shrill response of the opposition and mining industry, we need to consider the proposed new mining tax in a wider context.
I am not an economist, so perhaps am not trained to come up with sage explanations about why what happened in the past did not comply with my predictions, but is seems to me that in a global context, at some point the financial music will stop, and the piper will have to be paid the bill for decades of public sector overspending in most developed economies. At that time, the money will not be there, as Greece is finding, and I suspect Spain is about to discover, and so the solutions are pretty painful, savage reduction of immediate spending, and substantial increases in taxation, which in some economies will need to be draconian to address the debt.
In this country, we have been partially insulated by the demand for resources. However, the source of debt finance for the rest of the world has been the trading surpluses of our resource export customers, and at some point they will stop lending, and at that time, their demand for our resources will drop substantially. That is when the do-do will hit the political fan, so it appears better to start to claw back public costs, and increase public revenues in ways that will ease the pain that will otherwise come.
Charging a premium for the once only use of Australia’s natural resources over and above corporate tax rates appears to be a pretty good option to me, and has been successfully done in petroleum, and by way of the Federal Resources Rent Tax (which was going to end the world when proposed, according to the industry), and the poorly managed state based mining royalty systems.
Clearly (to me at least) the extension of the resources rent tax in some form to mining is a very good way of addressing the financial molehills we have before they become the mountains Greece has built as it is morally and economically defensible. Pity the Government has so abjectly failed to sell it, and the political opposition and mining industry response has been so successful in the short term, to our long term cost.
Jun 28, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant, Strategy
Now there is an explanation for the common situation where a person fails to see what to others appears to be blindingly obvious.
The Dunning-Kruger effect provides the psychological evidence supporting what most of us see often, and that is that our (and others) incompetence in an area masks our ability to recognise that incompetence. The “we don’t know what we don’t know” effect at work.
When you think about it, the absence of the skills we need to recognise a right answer when we see it, are the same as the skills required to produce a right answer in the first place. This makes sense when you read it twice.
Our exertions as we consider complex issues, from the future of the financial depredations of the GFC on the economy, to climate change, what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan, to the personal questions we all face, are all about making decisions today on the basis of our understanding of the best information we have available, but often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and often misused or ignored.
We therefore most often make those decisions in relative ignorance, seeking easy, saleable “solutions” to problems where we are ignorant, but unaware of it, or unable to concede it.
How scary is that?
Jun 27, 2010 | Branding, Customers, Marketing, Small business
“Cheap” implies less of everything that is important, not built to last, minimal attention to the detail, and certainly little customer service. However, “Frugal” implies a discipline that ensures that waste is eliminated, unnecessary features eliminated, but the basic performance is not compromised.
Cheap is never the outcome of good marketing, but Frugal is a very potent positioning in most markets, and is often ignored in the search for wider customer appeal.
Next time, ask yourself, if it is cheap, in which case, don’t buy or produce it, or frugal, in which case it may be a good deal.
Jun 24, 2010 | Management
Working with a relatively new client recently, I was very impressed with the data that was available, but bemused by the almost total absence of productive use that was made of it.
It became obvious pretty quickly that most of it was produced by rote, and there was no real thought given to the costs of producing the data, how it would be used, and the value that it would add, it was just done, because it had always been done, the original reasons for collating the data lost.
The exception was a suite of reports provided to the MD and executive team that went into minute detail, and took several people 2 weeks to produce each month, and created great angst because it provided a platform for allocation of blame, and caused great focus on the month gone, with little or no regard to what may happen in the future.
To assist making a change, we went through a process of rating the data on 4 simple parameters:
- Are we collecting data that will be used to answer questions that are worth asking?
- Does the data assist us to look forward, or is it just about yesterday?
- Do the individual pieces of data contribute to developing the larger picture of what is happening internally, and externally that we should know about, and what gaps are there?
- Is the data just quantitative, or is there a qualitative component that is adding to the story?
This simple list created some vigorous discussion, both about the relevance of the list itself, and the scores given to the data collected, but the outcome is a much smaller, user friendly suite, tailored to the needs of different functional management, that takes much less effort to assemble, enables intelligent review of performance, and is the basis of planning and decision making.
