Sep 15, 2009 | Leadership, Management
Two meetings in two days that demonstrated to me one of the key attributes of a leader.
The first, the group shut up until the leader said his piece, making sure everyone in the room knew he had a strongly held view. Everyone rushed to agree with him, despite the fairly obvious contradiction contained in his diatribe.
The following day, another meeting, another client. The boss made sure that everyone had spoken before he did, and he acknowledged where there were differences, and went out of his way to ensure that just because a view was different to his, did not make it any less valid. After a time, a consensus emerged through dialogue, and it was clear that the group would work its tail off individually and collectively to ensure implementation, in contrast the previous day, when any implementation would only have been achieved as a result of aggressive follow up by the CEO.
Real leaders often lead from the rear, the best are usually not the ones who provide what they see as the solution, but those who facilitate arrival at a solution.
Sep 14, 2009 | Uncategorized
Most people spend a lot of time polishing their CV’s, particularly whe they are on the lookout for an alternative role. However, how relevent is the paper CV in the age of the cyber-presence?
The first thing a prospective employer will do is google you, and hopefully the photos from “that” party 5 years ago have disappeared. The second thing they will do, if it is a position of some importance, will be to find someone who knows you, or has interacted with you, perhaps using Linked-in, or one of the other many networks that exist. Alternatively, if there is no record of you, anywhere, that is just as damming for a senior role carrying the responsability to articulate a position for your employer, or a point of view.
Your CV these days is a an ongoing project, something you have to work on continuously, not a once every 3 or 4 years “polish” to the written record of your activities.
By the time a prospective employer considers the paper CV seriously, the fix is in, “articulated” by your presence in the cyber mediums now available. Of course, fewer and fewer positions are now filled at senior levels by an ad, followed by a resume submission process. Now the head-hunters do the research and give you a call towards the end of the process, to determine your level of interest in a role you had not heard about.
Sep 13, 2009 | Change, Innovation, Leadership
Transaction costs occur when you do something, opportunity costs, even harder to measure, occur when you do nothing.
Transaction costs are well hidden inside the activities that take place in your business, and short of introducing activity costing, are usually hard to determine with certainty. However, what is certain in every business I have ever seen is that they can be reduced, usually significantly.
It takes common sense, determination, leadership, and a willingness to break open the status quo to reduce transaction costs, none of which are easy, which is why it can be such a powerful competitive tool, your competitors will find it just as hard, and will often shy away.
Opportunity costs are even harder to measure, and usually it is only with hindsight that any measurement is possible, but then almost nobody wants to point out what could have happened if you had done something differently, and that is exactly why it is such a powerful concept to consider.
Ask yourself: “If we…………., what might happen?” as a part of your planning processes.
Sep 10, 2009 | Change, Management, Uncategorized
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, used a graph 40 years ago to predict the rate of growth in IT capacity by stating his belief that the number of transistors that could be put onto a chip would double every two years.
He was talking about computing power, a long way from the environmental debates raging around us currently.
On the radio a day or two ago, I heard a credible source observe that he was astonished to note the rate of carbon being released to the atmosphere was roughly double estimations made just a couple of years ago.
This comment brought to mind Moore’s law, and started me wondering if it perhaps applied to the climate change debate. A recent Newsweek article also observed the rates of carbon emissions were well up on estimates, and that the rates were increasing, significantly because the rate of change was feeding on itself, creating a sort of multiplier effect, Moore’s law at work.
The unedifying sight of Australia’s two political parties taking opposite sides of the debate, simply because that was their allocated role, and apparently refusing to allow the facts to get in the way of a good argument smacks of Monty Python, not the serious debate that is required to start to address the scientific, commercial and social issues surrounding reality, or otherwise, of human induced climate change.
If Moore’s law holds true in the rate of release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the release of carbon is indeed a cause of global warming, we will need to move very quickly indeed to prevent, or perhaps at best mitigate, a catastrophe.
Sep 9, 2009 | Demand chains, Management
Power has shifted dramatically to consumers from the firms that inhabit the supply chains that serve them.
Scale used to give market power that could be leveraged, but IT development has radically changed the location of the power towards the customer.
Scale now just gives the opportunity through scope and access to resources, but that is no longer enough without the one to one engagement with customers enabled by technology.
You do not have to be big to be intimate with a customer, you just have to understand them and react to their needs, thereby turning the old notion of a supply chain on its head, creating a “demand chain”.
