Aug 9, 2009 | Uncategorized
There is a growing trend, perhaps driven by the difficult times for management to set very big goals, the “Big Hairy Audacious Goals” proposed by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book “Built to last”, and hope to create the focus necessary to achieve the BHAG outcome.
Often however, the opposite appears to occur, as those in the organization charged with the execution of the plans simply do not believe the objectives are achievable.
Sometimes this is just that the objective is divorced from the reality of the competitive environment, sometimes it is simply a failure of leadership to recognise and allocate the necessary resources, but most often, the BHAG is just wishful management thinking that takes the place of the hard analysis and challenging leadership that goes with out of the box development.
The lesson is to develop audacious goals within a framework of communication and consultation in the business to develop the buy-in from the operating level people and then, a Big Hairy Audacious Goal can be a hugely motivating factor, and has a chance of being achieved.
Aug 8, 2009 | Management, Marketing, Strategy
That ability to make quick decisions that more often than not, turn out to the right choice is an envied and rare talent. How much is just pure talent, and how much is training, instinct, and experience?
After 35 years of engagement with management, it appears to me that the talent, without the training and experience is as good as a great cricketer with his favorite bat in hand, approaching the first tee in a golf tournament.
Aug 6, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Marketing, Sales
Every business has in some form a process for generating, qualifying, and allocating resources to sales leads. In many businesses, it is a very expensive, resource hungry exercise, so finding a way to short circuit the process, would be offer the potential for a major increase in productivity.
One Australian business, Cormack Packaging has evolved an Innovation Award over a number of years that is a collaboration between Cormack, and a number of universities offering design degrees. Cormack coordinates a competitive process judged by industry experts, that offers final year design students a project that carries a monetary prize, a commercial design assignment, and increasing prestige for those who do well, as well as royalties on anything that is commercialized. Cormack offers technical support, and access to its facilities to the students, providing valuable real world experience for the participants.
Importantly, for a modest investment, Cormack is creating a “bank” of ideas that address real world problems, and a forum for the ideas to be given a commercial airing. Apart from contributing to the “design gene pool” in a substantial manner, they are able to identify emerging design talent and harness it, as well as providing a reason for their customers and potential customers to shop with Cormack for solutions to their problems.
This is a massive short circuit of the lead generation and qualification processes their competitors engage in. How much better to engage with the decision-makers from existing and potential customers in a forum whose objective is the development of innovative solutions to a specific set of packaging challenges, rather than having reps cold call potential customers in an attempt to get an audience with someone who cares.
Aug 5, 2009 | Innovation, Management, Strategy
The usual interpretation of the function of the hemispheres of the brain is that left brain types become actuaries, and right brain types become artists. How then do you accommodate Albert Einstein, a great mathematician, and a great creative brain in one, Leonardo is another, we all know some, perhaps a bit less well known than those two.
Could it be that our accepted model is wrong? Perhaps left brain types are comfortable with the status quo, the way things are, whereas the right brain types are more likely to seek a different way of looking at things, are comfortable with ambiguity, and see things in ways others do not.
Innovation has at its core a restlessness with the status quo, and it is well accepted that “dissidents” in organizations are the ones who are the catalysts to change, they also suffer a higher than average corporate mortality rate, but without dissidents, nothing new gets done, so don’t just tolerate them, attract, encourage, and reward them.
Aug 4, 2009 | Demand chains, Innovation, Operations
The impact of current behavior of all who are engaged in an alliance on the perceptions and expectations that will drive the evolution of the alliance into the future is pervasive.
Success breeds expectations of more success, and failure breeds blame and retribution. Any alliance has its setbacks, so the latter influence often brings alliance development to a shuddering halt. Those engaged in addressing the challenges of alliance evolution for the first time often do so from the perspective of the types of assumptions made by economists and accountants, that of rational behavior.
Anyone who has spent any time dealing with a number of alliances has seen evidence that much of what goes on cannot be explained by using assumptions of rational behavior, it is far more influenced by what may be seen as irrational behavior, until a social psychologist becomes involved, then many actions become predictable as the vagaries of behavior are factored in.
I have previously noted the impact of an apparently irrational need for revenge demonstrated by Ernst Fehr an economist at the University of Zurich, in a game widely known as the “trust game with revenge” in which an apparently irrational need for what can be termed revenge, is demonstrated to be a hard-wired behavior.
This apparently irrational drive for revenge, in this context of alliance development is often just a minor bit of “pay-back,” for perceived slights and misbehavior, but it has brought many nacent alliances to an end.
